What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Specific applications of AI include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition, and machine vision.

Artificial intelligence is all around us, even in places you may not realize. From music preference to home appliances and healthcare, the power of AI is far-reaching. But first, let’s explore the basics of AI with this definition from Investopedia.

Artificial Intelligence refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions. The term may also be applied to any machine that exhibits traits associated with a human mind such as learning or problem-solving.

Examples of artificial intelligence include:

Smart assistants like Siri Alexa and Google Assistant.
Pandora and Netflix provide personalized song and entertainment recommendations

Chatbots

Robotic vacuum cleaners

Self-driving vehicles

Facial recognition software

In recent times, AI has become faster, smarter, and more accurate.

E.g., Spotify recommendations. The more music or podcasts you listen to via Spotify, the better able Spotify is to recommend other content that you might enjoy. Same thing with Twitter and Amazon.
Artificial intelligence is the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience.
AI leverages computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind.
AI is a very broad concept and what most refer to as AI is just a small aspect of it like machine learning. AI requires a foundation of specialized hardware and software for writing and training machine learning algorithms. No one programming language is synonymous with AI but a few including Python, R, and Java are popular.

AI applications include advanced web search engines(e.g. Google Search, recommendation systems(used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix), understanding human speech( such as Siri and Alexa), and self-driving cars(e.g. Waymo)
All 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 chats can learn to produce lifelike exchanges with people or an image recognition tool.

AI programming focuses on three cognitive skills: learning, reasoning, and self-correction.

Learning processes: This aspect of AI programming focuses on acquiring data and creating rules for how to turn the data into actionable information. The rules which are called algorithms provide computing devices with step-by-step instructions for how to complete a specific task.

Reasoning processes: This aspect of AI programming focuses on choosing the right algorithm to reach a desired outcome.

Self-correction processes: This aspect of AI programming is designed to continually fine-tune algorithms and ensure they provide the most accurate results possible.

Strong AI versus weak AI:

Weak AI also known as narrow AI is an AI system that is designed and trained to complete a specific task. Industrial robots and virtual personal assistants such as Apple’s Siri use weak AI.

Strong AI: also known as artificial general intelligence(AGI), describes programming that can replicate the cognitive abilities of the human brain. When presented with an unfamiliar task, a strong AI system can use fuzzy logic to apply knowledge from one domain to another and find a solution autonomously. In theory, a strong AI program should be able to pass both a Turing test and the Chinese room test.

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