Exploring the Potential of AI and Dentistry Dr.Thomas Nguyen is an assistant professor at the McGill Faculty of DentalMedicine andOral Sciences. In 1943, the first scientific paper to discuss what would eventually become the field of artificial intelligence (AI) was titled, A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity. It drew upon the ideas of Alan Turing, who is considered the father of theoretical computer science. “Although it has been a discipline for more than 70 years, for most of that time AI remained mainly theoretical because of a lack of computing power,” says Dr. Thomas Nguyen, an assistant professor at McGill University and co-author of a 2021 JCDA article1 on AI anddentistry.“In2012, therewas anexplosionof AI in termsof research and publication.”That year, deep learning began to dominate the field of AI, and it saw some success due to computer hardware improvements and access to large amounts of data. “In recent years, applications of AI have become mainstream, as I’m sure most of us have seen” says Dr. Nguyen. A neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions was released in 2021. ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model that generates human-like text, launched in 2022. “We can expect AI to influence dentistry in the near future,” says Dr. Nguyen. 22 | 2023 | Issue 6
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