BeginnerLesson 1 of 68 min read
What is artificial intelligence?
A course from the Academy: AI finally made clear: the foundations
Go to the quiz ↓You hear "artificial intelligence" everywhere, but the term is misleading: there's no brain, no consciousness, no will behind it. An AI is a computer program capable of performing tasks that, in a human, would require intelligence: recognising a face, translating a sentence, writing a text, winning at chess.
An old idea become reality
The term dates back to 1956. For decades, researchers wrote rules by hand: "if the email contains the word 'won', then it's spam". That worked poorly, because the real world has too many exceptions. The revolution came when the logic was reversed: instead of writing the rules, you show the machine millions of examples and it discovers the rules on its own. That's machine learning, the engine of all modern AI.
Narrow AI and general AI
Everything that exists today is "narrow" AI: brilliant in its domain, useless outside it. The program that beats the world champion at Go can't play checkers. Even ChatGPT, which seems to know everything, does only one thing: manipulate language. "General" AI (AGI), a machine as versatile as a human, doesn't exist yet; it's the stated goal of the major labs, and a huge topic of debate.
Key takeaways
- An AI is a program that performs "intelligent" tasks, without consciousness or intention.
- Modern AI learns from examples instead of following hand-written rules.
- All current AIs are specialised; general AI remains a hypothesis.
Key concepts
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