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What is AI? Here's everything you need to know about artificial intelligence
An executive guide to artificial intelligence, from machine learning and general AI to neural networks.
It depends who you ask.
Back in the 1950s, the fathers of the field, Minsky and McCarthy, described artificial intelligence as any task performed by a machine that would have previously been considered to require human intelligence.
That's obviously a fairly broad definition, which is why you will sometimes see arguments over whether something is truly AI or not.
Modern definitions of what it means to create intelligence are more specific. Francois Chollet, an AI researcher at Google and creator of the machine-learning software library Keras, has said intelligence is tied to a system's ability to adapt and improvise in a new environment, to generalise its knowledge and apply it to unfamiliar scenarios.
"Intelligence is the efficiency with which you acquire new skills at tasks you didn't previously prepare for," he said.
"Intelligence is not skill itself; it's not what you can do; it's how well and how efficiently you can learn new things."
It's a definition under which modern AI-powered systems, such as virtual assistants, would be characterised as having demonstrated 'narrow AI', the ability to generalise their training when carrying out a limited set of tasks, such as speech recognition or computer vision.
Typically, AI systems demonstrate at least some of the following behaviours associated with human intelligence: planning, learning, reasoning, problem-solving, knowledge representation, perception, motion, and manipulation and, to a lesser extent, social intelligence and creativity.
What are the uses for AI?
AI is ubiquitous today, used to recommend what you should buy next online, to understand what you say to virtual assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, to recognise who and what is in a photo, spot spam, or spot spam detect credit card fraud.
What are the different types of AI?
At a very high level, artificial intelligence can be split into two broad types:
Narrow AI
Narrow AI is what we see all around us in computers today -- intelligent systems that have been taught or have learned how to carry out specific tasks without being explicitly programmed how to do so.
This type of machine intelligence is evident in the speech and language recognition of the Siri virtual assistant on the Apple iPhone, in the vision-recognition systems on self-driving cars, or in the recommendation engines that suggest products you might like based on what you bought in the past. Unlike humans, these systems can only learn or be taught how to do defined tasks, which is why they are called narrow AI.
General AI
General AI is very different and is the type of adaptable intellect found in humans, a flexible form of intelligence capable of learning how to carry out vastly different tasks, anything from haircutting to building spreadsheets or reasoning about a wide variety of topics based on its accumulated experience.
This is the sort of AI more commonly seen in movies, the likes of HAL in 2001 or Skynet in The Terminator, but which doesn't exist today – and AI experts are fiercely divided over how soon it will become a reality.
Vastly more information here:
Thanks Nick for a useful and timely summary!
David.
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