Machines are getting smarter and smarter every year, but artificial intelligence is yet to live up to the hype that's been generated by some of the world's largest technology companies.
AI can excel at specific narrow tasks such as playing chess but it struggles to do more than one thing well. A seven-year-old has far broader intelligence than any of today's AI systems, for example.
"AI algorithms are good at approaching individual tasks, or tasks that include a small degree of variability," Edward Grefenstette, a research scientist at Meta AI, formerly Facebook AI Research, told CNBC.
"However, the real world encompasses significant potential for change, a dynamic which we are bad at capturing within our training algorithms, yielding brittle intelligence," he added.
AI researchers have started to show that there are ways to efficiently adapt AI training methods to changing environments or tasks, resulting in more robust agents, Grefenstette said. He believes there will be more industrial and scientific applications of such methods this year that will produce "noticeable leaps."
While AI still has a long way to go before anything like human-level intelligence is achieved, it hasn't stopped the likes of Google, Facebook (Meta) and Amazon investing billions of dollars into hiring talented AI researchers who can potentially improve everything from search engines and voice assistants to aspects of the so-called "metaverse."
Anthropologist Beth Singler, who studies AI and robots at the University of Cambridge, told CNBC that claims about the effectiveness and reality of AI in spaces that are now being labeled as the metaverse will become more commonplace in 2022 as more money is invested in the area and the public start to recognize the "metaverse" as a term and a concept.
Singler also warned that there could be "too little discussion" in 2022 of the effect of the metaverse on people's "identities, communities, and rights."
