Artificial intelligence
Level 1
Software that performs tasks we normally think of as requiring human judgement.
Term 1 of 8 in Basic AI
In plain language
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is an umbrella term rather than a single product. It covers anything from a spam filter to a chatbot, as long as the software is making a judgement instead of following a fixed set of rules written by a person.
Think of it like this
Think of "AI" the way you think of "vehicle". A bicycle and a cargo ship are both vehicles, and knowing that tells you almost nothing about either one.
Why it matters
When someone says a product "uses AI", that sentence is nearly empty on its own. The useful question is always: what task is it doing, and how well?
Next terms in Basic AI
- Machine learningA way of building software that learns patterns from examples instead of being given rules.
- ModelThe trained file that holds everything an AI system learned.
- TrainingThe process of showing a model huge amounts of data so it can learn patterns.
- AlgorithmA defined set of steps for solving a problem.