What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Artificial intelligence, or AI, refers to the simulation of human intelligence by software-coded heuristics. Nowadays this code is prevalent in everything from cloud-based, enterprise applications to consumer apps and even embedded firmware.

The year 2022 brought AI into the mainstream through widespread familiarity with applications of Generative Pre-Training Transformer. The most popular applications are OpenAI's DALL-E text-to-image tool and ChatGPT. The widespread fascination with ChatGPT made it synonymous with AI in the minds of most consumers. However, it represents only a small portion of the ways that AI technology is being used today.

The ideal characteristic of artificial intelligence is its ability to rationalize and take actions that have the best chance of achieving a specific goal. A subset of artificial intelligence is machine learning (ML), which refers to the concept that computer programs can automatically learn from and adapt to new data without being assisted by humans. Deep learning techniques enable this automatic learning through the absorption of huge amounts of unstructured data such as text, images, or video.