Hi Tanmay, welcome and tell us how old are you? I'm 15 years old. Great. How did you get started in technology and AI? Sure. So I've been working with technology for over 10 years now. It all started back when I was around five years old because my dad used to work as a computer programmer, and watching him program almost all day were so fascinating to me, that I really wanted to find out more. I wanted to find out how computers could do really anything that they did? Whether that be displaying my name on the screen, or adding two numbers, or really anything of that sort, it was like magic to me at that age. So my dad introduced me to the world of programming, and I've been working with code. I submitted my first iOS application and more. But when I was around 10 years old, I started to feel like technology wasn't as fun as it used to be for me. Technology wasn't as exciting as it used to be for one simple reason, it's because technology was very rigid, you code something in and it immediately starts to become obsolete, it never adapts, it never changes new data, new users, new circumstances they create. But when I was 11 years old, I actually stumbled upon a documentary on IBM Watson playing and winning the Jeopardy game show back in 2011. So of course, that immediately fascinated me, as to how a computer can play Jeopardy, and so I went ahead do a little bit more research, found out that IBM provides Watson's individual components as APIs on the cloud. I did a little bit more research, started to create my very first sort of cognitive applications, and I also created tutorials on my YouTube channel, on how others can also leverage the IBM Watson APIs. So really ever since I was 11 years old, I've been working with machine learning technology through numerous different services like IBM Watson. That's awesome. So what does AI mean for you? Really what AI means to me, before I get to that, before I can explain what AI is to me. I think it's first important to understand really what others like to think of AI as. Now, a lot of people have this very sort of split, this sort of very sort of bipolar response to machine learning or AI, as people call it. Some people are like, yes, it's the greatest technology of all time, and some people are like, this will be the downfall of humanity. I'd say that neither of those responses would be correct. The reason I say that is because machine learning technology is technology. It's very advanced technology, it helps us do things that we never could have done before, but it's just that, it's technology. Artificial intelligence and machine learning is something that people have been working on mathematically since even before computers were a thing. Machine learning technology is not new at all, in fact, it existed the very fundamentals at least, for many decades before I was even born. But the thing is machine learning technology or at least, for example, the basic perceptron and these sorts of mathematical techniques have existed since even before computers or calculators became popular. So when we were creating these sorts of machine-learning concepts and AI, and we started to create literature and movies on the future of technology and computers, we barely had any idea of not only where technology would go in the future, but also what technology really is. Because of that, people have this very common misconception of artificial intelligence being the human mind within a computer, the human intelligence simulated wholly within a computer. But that couldn't be farther from the truth. Machine learning or AI is not simulating a human mind, but what it does try and do, is it tries to open up new doors for computers. It tries to enable computers to understand certain kinds of data that they couldn't have understood before. So for example, if you take a look at what we as humans are so special at, the fact that we can understand natural language, in fact, we are the only animal to have such a complex ability of being able to communicate in natural language, even if through something that I have not directly witnessed or seen or heard evidence for, I can still describe that imaginative concept to you, that is actually really wonderful. We're also great at understanding at raw auditory data. I mean, imagine your brain is actually taking vibrations of air molecules and converting that to thoughts, that's really amazing. We're also great at processing visual data, like when you look at someone's face, the fact that you can instantly recognize them. When you look at someone's eyes, you can tell exactly where they're looking, that's really an amazing ability. These are things that computers cannot do because they are fundamentally limited to mathematics. They can only understand numbers and mathematical operations. But by using machine learning technology, you can actually take these mathematics, and use them to understand patterns in vast amounts of both structured and unstructured human data. The only difference here is that before, we as humans would manually construct these patterns and these conditions, whereas now it's done automatically for us at least mostly automatically by techniques like gradient descent and calculus. So machine learning technology is more accurate term for what AI really is today and will be in the future. Of course, artificial intelligence isn't meant to replace us because on a fundamental level, it is a completely different thing than a human brain.
