Drowning in Data

Too Much Data!

So, imagine you’re swimming in a huge pool of data—like, billions of photos of bridges or records of how people spend their money in a bank. It’s a lot, right? Well, this big pool of info is what businesses have, but they’re kinda stuck on what to do with it. That’s where AI (Artificial Intelligence) comes in, acting like a treasure map to find the good stuff hidden in all that data.

Let’s look at two examples: First, there’s a company that wants to find problems in bridges by looking at tons of photos. Then, there’s a bank that wants to figure out what its customers like to do with their money to offer them better deals. Both have loads of this unorganized data and want to make sense of it, which is tricky and can cost a lot.

How AI Changes the Game

To make all this messy data useful, there’s a bunch of steps, and some pretty cool AI technology helps out:

1. Cleaning Up the Mess: Imagine your phone’s photo gallery is cluttered with all sorts of pictures—pets, breakfast, sunsets—and you want to organize them. It’s like sorting through all those pics to create neat albums. Long before you were born, we used something called CNNs (kinda like a smart filter) to spot patterns and sort these pictures. But now, we’re switching to something smarter called Transformers (yeah, not the robots), which can look at your photos in a way that’s more like how you flip through them, making it super easy to group them by what’s actually in the picture, not just by when you took them.

2. Tagging Everything: Then, you have to put tags on the data, like tagging your friends on Facebook so you know who’s who. CNNs were good at this, but now we’ve got Foundation Models, big-brain AI that can handle lots of different tasks without much help.

3. Getting Organized: After tagging, you need to organize the data so it’s easy to use. There’s new tech that lets AI learn from just a few examples, making this step a lot faster.

4. Putting It to Work: Finally, you use all this prepared data to do cool stuff. Technologies like NAS and AutoML help find the best AI “brain” for the job, making it easier to go from idea to action. Send your mom and dad to Alt3 Reseach to learn more about this.

What’s New with AI

We’re seeing a big change where Transformers are starting to take over from CNNs, especially in figuring out what’s in pictures. This is a big deal because Transformers can handle complex stuff better, opening up new ways to use our data.

The Bottom Line

Turning this huge pile of data into something useful isn’t easy or cheap. But understanding the steps and the tech can make a big difference. This whole thing is about helping businesses use the latest AI to find the hidden treasures in their data lakes, turning them into oceans of opportunity.