Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines or software, as opposed to the intelligence of other living beings, primarily of humans. It is a field of study in computer science that develops and studies intelligent machines. Such machines may be called AIs.
AI technology is widely used throughout industry, government, and science. Some high-profile applications are: advanced web search engines (e.g. Google Search), recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix), interacting via human speech (such as Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g., Waymo), generative and creative tools (ChatGPT and AI art), and superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (such as chess and Go).
Goals
Reasoning, Problem solving, Knowledge representation, Planning and decision making, Learning, Natural language processing.
How does AI work?
As the hype around AI has accelerated, vendors have been scrambling to promote how their products and services use it. Often, what they refer to as AI is simply a component of the technology, such as machine learning. AI requires a foundation of specialized hardware and software for writing and training machine learning algorithms. No single programming language is synonymous with AI, but Python, R, Java, C++ and Julia have features popular with AI developers.
In general, AI systems work by ingesting large amounts of labeled training data, analyzing the data for correlations and patterns, and using these patterns to make predictions about future states. In this way, a chatbot that is fed examples of text can learn to generate lifelike exchanges with people, or an image recognition tool can learn to identify and describe objects in images by reviewing millions of examples. New, rapidly improving generative AI techniques can create realistic text, images, music and other media.