Best Languages for AI Development
With AI development currently growing at a rapid pace following a flood of generative content services online, the time to begin coding new algorithms and developing innovative products couldn’t be any better. A recent prediction by Goldman Sachs suggests that AI could result in nearly 300 million jobs being replaced by AI.
While this is a major concern for many people, it shows how AI is becoming a larger field for programmers, developers, and engineers to explore. However, not all software is made the same way. Each program requires its own set of tools and codes to operate correctly. So what are the most important programming languages that developers should know when building AI?
Understanding AI Development
When selecting which programming language to use for AI development, it is first important to understand the intricacies of developing artificial systems because AI is a multidisciplinary field that requires an advanced understanding of mathematics, computer science, statistics, and more.
Developing AI models can be categorized into 8 steps:
Problem Definition: Developers must decide what their AI model intends to solve. Purposes generally include predictive, classification, or recommendation tasks.
Data Collection and Preparation: In order to train an AI model, relevant data must be collected and cleaned, a process that deals with missing variables and other issues.
Feature Engineering: Data must then be altered into new forms that are compatible with AI models by extracting information and encoding categorical variables to create a training set.
Model Development and Training: Developers select learning algorithms to build their model and begin feeding it data from the training set.
Model Evaluation: The AI model is tested against a separate set of data called the test set (or validation set) to assess its performance and accuracy.
Model Tuning: After initial model evaluation, developers begin adjusting the parameters of the AI’s algorithm until satisfactory.
Deployment: Once in a presentable state, the AI model is ready to be deployed and used by customers as a service.
Monitoring and Updating: Consistent updating and patching are required next to keep the product useful.
Key Factors to Consider When Choosing a Language for AI
When choosing a programming language to use for an AI model, it is important to consider many factors that could aid or impede development progress:
Project Requirements: The intent and purpose of the AI model being developed play a strong factor in choosing a programming language such as whether the model is meant to analyze data or act as a web application.
Community Support: Programming languages can also be chosen based on their strong support from others, helping teams find helpful resources and information.
Libraries and Frameworks: Many of the most active communities have already created robust libraries of pre-written code to help aid AI development.
Compatibility: A significant factor for AI development is what platform models are intended to be run on. Different operating systems like Windows 11 and MacOS require different languages to be used.
Overview of the Top Languages for AI Development
Once a developer has decided on the intent and purpose of their AI models, or what they wish to study more of for the future, they can then begin selecting the proper language to run their algorithms.
Python: A common choice for many AI models because of its simplicity, using syntax that is easier to understand, and offers a large number of libraries to search through.
Java: Popular among most enterprise-grade businesses, Java is beneficial to AI development because of its scalability.
R: Perfect for data-heavy models, R’s bases in mathematics make it a strong fit for models that are required to analyze large amounts of numerical information.
C++: Known for its performance and control, C++ also plays an integral role in AI components and hardware.
JavaScript: Becoming increasingly important as more web-based applications begin to implement AI features.
Swift: A great choice for developers that want to work specifically in Apple’s ecosystem as it continues to expand with innovative products.
Choosing the Right Language for Your AI Project
While there are numerous options for engineers to choose from when looking at which programming language to use for AI and Machine Learning development, it’s still wise to stay within your realm of expertise and build AI applications that are related to the programming languages you know best.
Of course, there is no penalty for learning more to improve yourself, but AI is showing no signs of slowing down and it might be best to build on what you already know instead of pursuing new skills in a field of study that is growing larger by the day.
