Complete beginnerLesson 1 of 55 min read
AI, algorithm, robot: three words, three things
A course from the Academy: The words you hear everywhere, finally clear
Go to the quiz ↓People use them interchangeably all the time. Yet they don't mean the same thing at all.
An algorithm
A sequence of instructions, written in advance, to achieve a result. A recipe is an algorithm. There's nothing intelligent about it, and they've existed long before computers.
An artificial intelligence
A program that, instead of following rules written one by one, has learned from examples. No one explained to it what a cat looks like: it was shown millions of photos and it figured out on its own what keeps recurring.
That's the whole difference: the algorithm applies what it was told, the AI generalises what it has seen.
A robot
A physical machine, with a body. A factory arm is a robot, and it can very well have no AI inside: it repeats a programmed motion. Conversely, ChatGPT is not a robot: it has no body.
Why it matters
When an article says "the social network's algorithm," it's talking about sorting, not intelligence. When it says "robots are going to replace us," it often conflates two different topics. Knowing which of the three is at stake completely changes the meaning of the sentence.
Key concepts
Complete the lesson
A 4-question quiz: 3 correct answers are enough, plus an exercise to practise. It opens in the Academy, on this same lesson.
Take the quiz and complete the lesson Free. With an account, your progress is saved and leads to the course certificate.The course: The words you hear everywhere, finally clear
- AI, algorithm, robot: three words, three things5 min
- Model, LLM, training: the words of the engine6 min
- Prompt, context, token: the words of usage.5 min
- The words that scare us, put back in their place6 min
- What "free" means here5 min