What is AI?

See [[Week 1 - Introduction]] or the [[Main AI Page]]

Transcript

There's a lot of talk about artificial intelligence these days. How do you define or what does AI mean for you?

There is a lot of talk and there's a lot of definitions for what artificial intelligence says.

So one of them is about teaching the machines to learn, and act, and think as humans would.

Another dimension is really about how do we get the machines to- how do we impart more of a cognitive capabilities on the machines and sensory capabilities. 

So it's about analyzing images and videos about natural language processing and understanding speech. It's about pattern recognition, and so on, and so forth. 

So the third axis is more around creating a technology that's able to, in some cases, replace what humans do.

I'd like to think of this as augment what humans do.

To me personally, the most important part of definition for artificial intelligence is about imparting the ability to think and learn on the machines.

To me that's what defines artificial intelligence.

AI is the application of computing to solve problems in an intelligent way using algorithms.

So what is an intelligent way? Well, an intelligent way may be something that mimics human intelligence.

Or it may be a purely computational approach and optimization approach but something that manipulates data in a way to get not obvious results out, I think, is what I would classify as being artificially intelligent.

I would define AI as a tool that uses computer to complete a task automatically with very little to no human intervention. 

To me AI is really a complex series of layers of algorithms that do something with the information that's coming into it. Artificial intelligence is a set of technologies that allows us to extract knowledge from data.

So it's any kind of system that learns or understands patterns within that data, and can identify them, and then reproduce them on new information. 

Artificial intelligence is not the kind of simulating human intelligence that people think it is. It's really not about intelligence at all.

But I think another word that describes AI more accurately today is machine learning.

The reason I say that is because machine learning technology is all about using essentially mathematics on computers in order to find patterns in data. Now this data can be structured or unstructured. The only difference between machine learning and the technologies that came before it is instead of us, as humans, having to manually hard code these patterns, and these conditions into computers.

They're able to find these patterns on their own by using math. That's really the only difference here.

So what I'd say artificial intelligence is, is it's a set of mathematical algorithms that enable us to have computers find, very deep and patterns that we may not have even known exist, without us having to hard code them manually.