Artificial intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence (AI)

What is artificial intelligence (AI)?Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computersystems. Specific applications of AI include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognitionand machine vision.

How does AI work?As the hype around AI has accelerated, vendors have been scrambling to promote how their products andservices use it. Often, what they refer to as AI is simply a component of the technology, such as machinelearning. AI requires a foundation of specialized hardware and software for writing and training machinelearning algorithms. No single programming language is synonymous with AI, but Python, R, Java, C++ andJulia have features popular with AI developers.

In general, AI systems work by ingesting large amounts of labeled training data, analyzing the data forcorrelations and patterns, and using these patterns to make predictions about future states. In this way, a chatbotthat is fed examples of text can learn to generate lifelike exchanges with people, or an image recognition toolcan learn to identify and describe objects in images by reviewing millions of examples. New, rapidly improvinggenerative AI techniques can create realistic text, images, music and other media.

AI programming focuses on cognitive skills that include the following: Learning. This aspect of AI programming focuses on acquiring data and creating rules for how to turnit into actionable information. The rules, which are called algorithms, provide computing devices withstep-by-step instructions for how to complete a specific task. Reasoning. This aspect of AI programming focuses on choosing the right algorithm to reach a desiredoutcome. Self-correction. This aspect of AI programming is designed to continually fine-tune algorithms andensure they provide the most accurate results possible. Creativity. This aspect of AI uses neural networks, rules-based systems, statistical methods and otherAI techniques to generate new images, new text, new music and new ideas.