What is Artificial Intelligence?
When someone mentions the term “artificial intelligence”(AI), the first thing that usually comes to mind is an army of human-like robots rebelling against humanity, or in a positive sense, a robot helping you walk your dog down the street.
Basically speaking, artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a machine or a computer program to think and learn. The concept of AI is based on the idea of building machines capable of thinking, acting, and learning like humans.
Is AI the same as Machine Learning?
We'll just go straight to the poin here by saying no. Think of machine learning as an application of AI. Artificial intelligence is a broader concept, while machine learning is the most common application of AI.
Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can access data and learn from it automatically, without human assistance or intervention. The entire machine learning concept is based on the assumption that we should give machines access to information and let them learn from it themselves.
Artificial intelligence, in its turn, is a bunch of technologies that include machine learning and some other technologies like natural language processing, inference algorithms, neural networks, etc.
Does Artificial Intelligence exist yet?
Of course. Developers such as ourselves and many others make use of this technology.
Take Siri or Alexa as an example. They are personal assistants that have already become the new normal for thousands of people around the globe. These and similar intelligent gadgets are able to recognize our speech, analyze the information they have access to, and provide an answer or solution.
The remarkable thing about such assistants is that they continuously learn about their users until the point at which they are able to accurately anticipate users’ needs.
