How can I create intelligent applications? Do I need extensive mathematical expertise? Do I need to spend a lot of money? Where do I start?

In this article we will answer these questions and give you some ideas on how you can apply artificial intelligence to your business or use case. In short, we tell you how artificial intelligence can be accessible to everyone.  But first, let me tell you what artificial intelligence is, analysing its definition and solving some questions about its use.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Artificial intelligence, or more commonly known as AI, is currently experiencing a moment of glory. Every week we can see on the news, or on technology news channels, surprising news about new advances in AI. This has reached such a point that completely innovative and sophisticated solutions, as if by magic, come to be perceived as natural or even simple, when they hide, by nature, an exceptional complexity. Clearly, technology, and specifically AI, is changing, we don’t know whether for better or worse, many of the activities we carry out in our daily lives.

However, it is possible that everyone has a different notion of what AI is. For some, AI may be about technologies that surpass human intelligence. For example, the operating system in the movie Her, with Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role, comes to mind. For others, any technology that processes or handles data can be considered AI.

As you have probably observed, the definition of AI seems to be not entirely clear, as the public perception of this technology is somewhat diffuse. As a result, there is still no exact and agreed definition. What we can say is that an intelligent system is characterised by being autonomous and adaptive. That is, the first term refers to the system’s ability to perform tasks without user supervision, while the second is about learning from experience.

Why is AI so important?

Obviously, AI is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but is present in our society, implemented in our computing devices, vehicles or even cities, among many other things. Specifically, we depend on AI techniques to identify emails as spam, search the internet, edit a photo, interact with virtual assistants or receive product recommendations, among many others. In short, this means that we are already surrounded by AI, and this influence only seems to be growing.

Problems of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

In general, advances in AI would be positive for society as a whole, were it not for the fact that behind them are, in most cases, the world’s leading technology companies. This means that large companies have control over access to AI. This therefore gives them the ability to influence (explicitly or implicitly) various sectors of the world economy, making them a single global monopoly.

In order to prevent this from happening, and also because of the pervasiveness of AI, the scientific community and policy makers have advocated for AI to be inclusive and accessible to everyone. There is a growing consensus for its ‘democratisation’ and ensuring that the benefits of this technology are not limited to a small group of companies. The goal is to make it possible for everyone to create and have access to artificial intelligence systems. This democratisation is therefore vital to avoid biased and unfair AI, as it has the potential to exacerbate existing social inequalities.

Democratisation of AI

This term can be defined briefly as the fact that any individual is able to create systems with an intelligent component. On the one hand, it means that in science, diverse solutions to more research challenges can be explored, with the potential for new discoveries and breakthroughs to be produced more frequently. On the other hand, in terms of the creation of products and services, democratisation means more people creating value for their communities and more competition in the marketplace. 

For this democratisation to take place, at least the following points must be met:

• To have free access to AI models.
• Free access to algorithms.
• Free access to computational resources to use algorithms and models.
• Remove barriers, e.g. having advanced knowledge in mathematics and computer science to use algorithms and models.

Ultimately, the aim is to reduce the barrier that exists today with regard to the use of AI. Any individual or organisation should have the opportunity to experiment with this technology, taking advantage of sophisticated and complex algorithms. It should not be a fundamental requirement to invest heavily in AI. It should be sufficient to have access to a computer and the internet.

Democratised AI solutions for your business or use case

Having established the basics of what artificial intelligence is and its democratisation, let’s look at some of the solutions that could be useful for you to start a new project and have access to it. The following examples show technologies, some open source, some pay-per-use, that help and greatly facilitate the development of intelligent applications. There are many more, but these are enough to cover a wide spectrum of current issues.

• GPT-3: It is an AI model capable of generating written language from a previous sentence. In other words, the user writes a short paragraph and the model is able to complete the text as coherently as possible. GPT-3 is accessible through a pay-per-use API. In addition, the model could be adapted to the content of specific applications or services.
• Stable Diffusion: It is an AI model capable of generating images from text. In other words, the model receives a sentence as input and produces an image as output based on this description. It is open source, so it can be freely modified for specific use cases.
• Whisper: It is an AI model able to transcribe audio, that is, podcasts, songs, interviews, etc., with a really high level of accuracy. It is also capable of detecting spoken language and translating it almost to the level of a human being. Moreover, Whisper is open source, which means that it can be modified to improve speech processing.

Furious Koalas proposal: automatic ‘GenerIAdor’ of text-based images

At Furious Koalas we have developed a customisable tool capable of generating high quality digital images from natural language descriptions. ‘GenerIAdor’ only needs a total of 20 images to train your model and put it to work.

This application allows you to create specific designs, from already trained concepts, by applying different styles, e.g. realism, impressionism, abstract, etc. All this in a matter of seconds without any knowledge of graphic design. Simply add a textual description of the trained concept and the application will do the rest.

Main features of the FK Image Generator (GenerIAdor)

• GenerIAdor is based on the open source Stable Difussion 1.5 model.
• The tool allows different pre-trained models to be loaded and a number of styles to be applied to the images. The models are binary files with the specific configuration for the tool to be able to generate images of a concept, e.g. a specific person, animal, object, etc.
• The application understands the concepts and descriptions that are used for image generation. Thus, results that might not be the desired ones are automatically replaced by others with a higher degree of realism.
• The speed of image generation is extremely fast. GenerIAdor is capable of producing up to 10 different designs of a concept in less than 1 minute.
• This approach allows for rapid prototyping of concepts that an artist can use to finally materialise a design.
• A number of strategies have been designed to control the generation of inappropriate content. In this way we prevent the use of this application for non-legal purposes.

In addition to this tool, Furious Koalas has been applying artificial intelligence to various business projects for years. If you need an expert team with extensive experience, do not hesitate to contact us. You can do so by clicking here.