What is AI or Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence is a computing technology that helps computers to learn. The objective of this technology is to enable a computer to accomplish human-like activities.

AI makes computers “learn” from a massive amount of data so that they can perform their desired tasks. This technology is completely different from rule-based automation, and it uses technologies like Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Read more about AI in “Artificial intelligence: what it is and why it matters”.

The beginning of AI could be traced back to the war-time work of British computer scientist Alan Turing, however, the word “Artificial Intelligence” first emerged in 1956. This was in the course of the Dartmouth Conference in the same year, organized by American computer scientist John McCarthy. The research on AI went through various ups and downs, and you can read “History of AI” to learn about them.

AI can be divided into two categories, and they are “Narrow AI” and “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI). You can find examples of narrow AI in many applications around you, e.g., Google search, image recognition software, Siri, Alexa, IBM’s Watson, and self-driving cars.

Narrow AI uses machine learning and deep learning extensively, and it’s abuzz with various exciting developments. However, research is still in progress on AGI, i.e., the category of AI that will create machines with human-level intelligence that will do any task. You can read more about these categories in “What is artificial intelligence?”.