Today I tried a little experiment. I had a photo taken of me under the porch at Ca' Paradiso, wearing my white shirt and yellow shorts, with colorful prayer flags in the background, and I gave it to an artificial intelligence with a simple question: how old could this man be?
The answer: between 55 and 65, probably around 60. I'll turn 62 at Christmasโฆ so it got it right, even though I was hoping for a few years off! It didn't just throw out a number: it explained its reasoning by looking at my hair and beard (now completely white), the laugh lines when I smile, my hands, my upright posture, and it even noticed that the skin of someone who lives outdoors tends to look more "weathered". On the bright side, it said my big smile takes a few years off.
As a computer guy, a leap through time
I worked in IT for forty years, and this experiment made me think about how far we've come.
- 1950s: Alan Turing asks whether a machine can think, and in 1956 at Dartmouth the term "artificial intelligence" is officially born.
- 1980s: "expert systems" arrive, huge piles of hand-written rules. They only worked in narrow fields, and one unexpected case was enough to break them.
- The AI "winters": promises too big, disappointing results, funding cut. For years many people considered AI dead.
- 1997: IBM's Deep Blue beats Kasparov at chess. More brute force than intelligence, but it made headlines worldwide.
- From 2012: deep neural networks, powered by lots of data and powerful graphics cards, start recognizing images and voices better than any traditional program.
- 2017 and beyond: the "Transformer" architecture is born, the foundation of modern language models. In 2022 ChatGPT brings AI into everyone's home.
- Today: models that read text, look at photos, write code, reason step by step and, as you've seen, estimate a person's age while explaining why.
When I started, to get a computer to do something you had to explain it line by line. Today you show it a photo, ask a question in plain language, and it answers like an attentive friend would. It's not magic, and it still makes mistakes, but the leap is enormous.
What about you?
Would you trust an AI to guess your age? For now, I'm holding on tight to my smile. ๐
Find me on my new account
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See you soon from the hills of Cagli,
Matteo
Ca' Paradiso, Cagli
www.caparadiso.com