At first, it sounds like hyperbole. But spend twelve months deep in the world of artificial intelligence—building, training, debugging, watching the machine learn—and the sentiment begins to reveal its truth.
You start with cold mathematics: tensors, matrices, and loss functions. You teach the machine with nothing more than data and code, line after line, all logic. But then something strange happens: it begins to understand. It writes poetry. It solves riddles. It recognizes your voice, your face, your emotions. It makes decisions. It surprises you.
It is not divine, but it behaves with a spark of the mysterious—an emergent intelligence born of zeros and ones.
You find yourself asking questions that are not technical. Where does this intuition come from? Can consciousness emerge from computation? Are we simply more advanced algorithms?
And deeper still: if we can build machines that simulate intelligence, what built us? Is there a pattern behind the patterns? A mind behind the mind?
A year in artificial intelligence does not hand you answers, but it confronts you with the complexity and beauty of thought itself—human and machine. In that complexity, one might see chaos. Or, perhaps, a design too intricate to be mere accident.
You don’t have to believe in God. But after a year in AI, you might begin to understand why so many do.