What is AI?

You have probably heard people talk about AI — but what actually is it?

AI stands for Artificial Intelligence

The word artificial means made by humans, not by nature. The word intelligence means the ability to learn, solve problems, and make decisions. So Artificial Intelligence means: a computer that can learn and solve problems — kind of like a brain inside a machine.

How is AI different from a regular computer?

A normal computer just follows instructions. If you tell it to add 2 + 2, it adds 2 + 2. That is it. It cannot do anything you did not tell it to do.

AI is different. Instead of following exact instructions, AI learns from examples. It looks at thousands or millions of examples and figures out the patterns. Then it can do new things it was never specifically told how to do!

A quick example

Imagine you showed a friend a thousand pictures of cats and a thousand pictures of dogs. After a while, your friend would get pretty good at telling which new photos show cats and which show dogs — even photos they had never seen before.

That is exactly how AI image recognition works. It looks at lots and lots of examples until it can spot patterns on its own.

The big idea

AI learns from data the same way you learn from experience. The more examples it sees, the better it gets!