THE GUARDIAN
New trends released by Google have shown that search interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached an all time high in Nigeria.
The trends showed that people have searched for AI more than ever in 2023 so far, with interest rising 310 per cent since last year, and by 1,660 per cent in the last five years. Google’s research also revealed the top trending questions being asked about AI across Nigeria.
Providing answers to some critical questions on AI, Google West Africa Director, Olumide Balogun, said AI is a type of technology that can learn from its environment, experiences and people, and that can understand patterns and make projections better than any previous technology before it.
Balogun said AI models are trained and created by human engineers, who input data into the AI system to train it. Citing examples, he said in 2012, Google showed an AI model thousands of videos of cats on YouTube, so that it could learn to recognize a cat. “Now, with advancements in technology, we could give an AI model hundreds of books on animals to read – and, using those, it would be able to describe a cat to us on its own despite having never been shown one,” he stated.
According to him, once AI systems are trained, they’re tested to see if they work well.
On where AI started from, Balogun said AI can be traced back to the early 1950s, when Alan Turing – a British mathematician – published a paper on “computing machinery and intelligence”.
He said that kick-started the principles behind AI – but the first time anyone used the term was in 1956, when John McCarthy hosted a conference at Dartmouth College called the Dartmouth Summer Research Project in AI.
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