What is AI, really?
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What you will learn
By the end, you can explain how AI learns from examples and sort the things AI can do from the things it cannot.
Tomas types to Pip, his pen-pal bot: "Write me a poem about my dog, Biscuit." Three seconds later a poem appears, and it is good. But Pip has never met Biscuit. How did it know what to write?
Read the explanation
AI (artificial intelligence) is software that learns patterns from huge numbers of examples, called training data. Millions of photos labelled "dog" teach it which shapes go with that label. Billions of sentences teach it which words usually follow which. It does not understand or feel. It predicts what fits the pattern.
- Training data: the examples an AI learns from. Wider, better examples give better patterns.
- AI is good at pattern jobs: sorting, translating, suggesting, predicting the next word.
- AI cannot feel, want, know if it is right, or check the real world by itself.