Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared in the Answering AI editorial section of our newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter to get exclusive insights and resources twice weekly (usually Tuesday/Thursday), as well as select promotions.
We can start by removing the hype and hyperbole and focusing on the fundamentals of what it is and what it's capable of doing. For marketers who are looking to better understand AI, here are three great, beginner-level resources.
First, check out this brilliantly simplistic article and flowchart from Karen Hao of MIT Technology Review (who, BTW, is presenting at our Marketing AI Conference in July). Karen states, “In the broadest sense, AI refers to machines that can learn, reason, and act for themselves. They can make their own decisions when faced with new situations, in the same way that humans and animals can.” The flowchart brings this all to life in an easy-to-follow sketch.
Next, watch this 5-minute YouTube video—What Is AI — For People In a Hurry!—from Dr. Raj Ramesh that has 505,000+ views. Dr. Ramesh walks viewers through the concepts of giving machines human-like capabilities of vision, speech, writing, hearing, understanding, movement, etc. You may need to replay it a few times if the topics of neural networks and supervised/unsupervised/reinforcement learning are new to you, but he does a great job of simplifying AI in the context of how the human brain works.
Finally, when you're really ready to dive in, take Andrew Ng's amazing new Coursera program, AI For Everyone. I just completed the four-week course and it's fantastic. If you’re not familiar, Ng is co-founder of Coursera, adjunct professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and formerly chief scientist at Baidu and the founding lead of Google Brain. We’ll be writing and talking a lot more about this course in the coming weeks.
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