Artificial Intelligence as a Service(AIaaS)

That's not news anymore Artificial Intelligence is one of the most (maybe the most) hot topic in technology area nowadays. I have found myself studying and developing a lot about it and one of my recent articles bring some light about a new layer in software development, an Artificial Intelligence one.

I don't think that I need to defend the full range of benefits of that, there's many people doing this right now. My foccus here is to draw your attention to AI as a service.

If you google this you'll find some companies and projects promising you AIaaS. But what they offer is really an implementation of AIaaS? Better question: There is AIaaS?

We won't jump to conclusions, first we'll explore this concept starting by intelligence itself. Not the artificial one, the general concept of intelligence.

What is intelligence?

Certaintly the ability to learn is part of intelligence no one question that but is the intelligence concept exclusively bound to this trait? We know that don't.

Intelligence requires the ability to learn as much as the ability to use the knowledge that you acquired, associating different knowledge to build a solution to a problem. Not just a solution but a new solution!

Wait! So if I use an already found solution to a problem am I not being intelligent? Not exactly. You are reasoning that's undeniable but to be intelligent is more than use some sort of reasoning skills, since reasoning itself is not intelligence. Sure you have to reason to find a solution for a problem but the reasoning is a tool of the intelligence and not a synonymous of intelligence. Intelligence is the capability to find a new solution to a problem, to solve a problem or to create products.

Big data allow us to process an enormous set of data to find relations between things that we wouldn't be allowed to relate before due the size of all the available data and the appearance of irrelevance of the most of it. Then yes we can mine data to produce information and use that information to infer a knowledge about something, but that is not intelligence yet.

To solve a problem you need to be able to understand the problem, you need to interpret what is needed to be solved, and thanks to NLP(natural language processing) machines can understand natural language. Although understand a problem is part of the process that defines intelligence, it is not intelligence.

You have already figured out that a real implementation of AI needs to be able to learn, to acquired or produce new knowledge through data mining and inferences and to identify in some problem an application to that knowlegde.

Now you can tell if the AIaaS offered by some companies is really AI given as a service or not. To be AI it needs to be more than natural language processing or machine learning. It needs to be able to suggest a solution to a problem. It needs to do more than basic reasoning and needs to be autonomous.This can only be achieved with Artificial general intelligence and through the solving of the general AI challenge.