What is AI?
Before getting into the actual uses of AI, we should probably go over what it actually is first. It stands for Artificial Intelligence. It refers to the development of computer systems and machines that can perform tasks that would typically require human intelligence. AI involves the creation of intelligent agents capable of perceiving their environment, reasoning, learning, and making decisions based on data.
There are two (main) types of AI; Narrow and General.
You might already be familiar with Narrow AI and not even realise it. It’s designed to perform specific tasks set by the user. Examples would be the voice assistants on your phone or computer as well as the physical ones such as the Echo Dot and Alexa. They lack general intelligence and they’re more fitted for performing very specific things.
General AI are more complicated than that. They posses the ability to understand, learn and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks similar to human intelligence. In simple terms, it aims to replicate what humans can do. Namely, thinking and reasoning. True General AI doesn’t exist at the time of writing this, as that would most likely mean a truly sentient Artificial Intelligence had been created.
Training an Artificial Intelligence is somewhat simple. They use techniques such as machine learning, where algorithms are trained on large datasets to make predictions or decisions, and deep learning, a subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with multiple layers to process complex data.