artificial intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. While AI is an interdisciplinary science with multiple approaches, advancements in machine learning and deep learning, in particular, are creating a paradigm shift in virtually every sector of the tech industry. 

Artificial intelligence allows machines to model, or even improve upon, the capabilities of the human mind. And from the development of self-driving cars to the proliferation of generative AI tools like chat GPT and Google’s Bard, AI is increasingly becoming part of everyday life and an area companies across every industry are investing in.

Broadly speaking, artificially intelligent systems can perform tasks commonly associated with human cognitive functions such as interpreting speech, playing games and identifying patterns. They typically learn how to do so by processing massive amounts of data, looking for patterns to model in their own decision-making. In many cases, humans will supervise an AI’s learning process, reinforcing good decisions and discouraging bad ones. But some AI systems are designed to learn without supervision for instance, by playing a video game over and over until they eventually figure out the rules and how to win.

Strong AI, also known as artificial general intelegance, is a machine that can solve problems it’s never been trained to work on — much like a human can. This is the kind of AI we see in movies, like the robots from Westworld or the character Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. This type of AI doesn’t actually exist yet.

The creation of a machine with human-level intelligence that can be applied to any task is the Holy Grail for many AI researchers, but the quest for artificial general intelligence has been fraught with difficulty. And some believe strong AI research should be limited, due to the potential risk of creating a powerful AI without appropriate guardrails.

In contrast to weak AI, strong AI represents a machine with a full set of cognitive abilities — and an equally wide array of use cases — but time hasn't eased the difficulty of achieving such a feat.

A machine learning algorithm is fed data by a computer and uses statistical techniques to help it “learn” how to get progressively better at a task, without necessarily having been specifically programmed for that task. Instead, ML algorithms use historical data as input to predict new output values. To that end, ML consists of both supervised learning (where the expected output for the input is known thanks to labeled data sets) and unsupervised learning (where the expected outputs are unknown due to the use of unlabeled data sets).