AI glossary
What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is the field that gets computers to do tasks we associate with human intelligence: understanding language, seeing, deciding or creating.
It is a big umbrella. It covers everything from hand-written rule systems to systems that learn from data, which is what dominates today: machine learning and, inside it, deep learning.
Almost all the AI you use every day is narrow AI: it does one specific task very well (recommending a show, filtering spam, transcribing audio, chatting) but has no general understanding of the world. General AI, able to learn any intellectual task a human can, is still a research goal.
Generative AI, the kind that creates text, images or code, is the most visible part today, and its core piece is the large language model (LLM).
An example
The phone keyboard that suggests your next word, the spam filter in your email and a chatbot are three different uses of artificial intelligence.