Artificial intelligence
Also known as: AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the whole field of making machines do tasks that used to require human intelligence — seeing, understanding language, making decisions, creating things.
It’s a big umbrella. Most of what people mean by “AI” today is a small corner of it: large language models (the kind that chat with you). But the umbrella also covers things like self-driving perception, game-playing engines, and recommendation systems.
| Layer | What it is | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Narrow AI | built for one job | a spellchecker, a chess engine |
| Generative AI | produces new content | ChatGPT, image models |
| (Hypothetical) general AI | human-level across everything | does not exist yet |
Plain-English rule: if a program follows rules you wrote, it's not really AI in the interesting sense. AI starts when the system *learns* patterns from examples instead of you spelling out every rule.