"AI" redirects here.

For other uses, see AI (disambiguation), Artificial intelligence

(disambiguation), and Intelligent agent.
Artificial intelligence (AI), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines,
particularly computer systems, as opposed to the natural intelligence of living beings. It is a field
of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software which enable
machines to perceive their environment and uses learning and intelligence to take actions that
maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. Such machines may be called AIs.
AI technology is widely used throughout industry, government, and science. Some high-profile
applications include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search); recommendation
systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix); interacting via human speech (e.g., Google
Assistant, Siri, and Alexa); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo); generative and creative tools
(e.g., ChatGPT and AI art); and superhuman play and analysis in strategy
games (e.g., chess and Go). However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of
cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once
something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore."
Alan Turing was the first person to conduct substantial research in the field that he called
machine intelligence. Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956. The
field went through multiple cycles of optimism, followed by periods of disappointment and loss of
funding, known as AI winter. Funding and interest vastly increased after 2012 when deep
learning surpassed all previous AI techniques, and after 2017 with
the transformer architecture. This led to the AI boom of the early 2020s, with companies,
universities, and laboratories overwhelmingly based in the United States pioneering
significant advances in artificial intelligence.
The growing use of artificial intelligence in the 21st century is influencing a societal and economic
shift towards increased automation, data-driven decision-making, and the integration of AI
systems into various economic sectors and areas of life, impacting job markets, healthcare,
government, industry, and education. This raises questions about the long-term effects, ethical
implications, and risks of AI, prompting discussions about regulatory policies to ensure the safety
and benefits of the technology.
The various sub-fields of AI research are centered around particular goals and the use of
particular tools. The traditional goals of AI research include reasoning, knowledge
representation, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception, and support
for robotics. General intelligence—the ability to complete any task performable by a human on an
at least equal level—is among the field's long-term goals.
To reach these goals, AI researchers have adapted and integrated a wide range of techniques,
including search and mathematical optimization, formal logic, artificial neural networks, and
methods based on statistics, operations research, and economics. AI also draws
upon psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, and other fields.
Goals
The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken into sub-problems.
These consist of particular traits or capabilities that researchers expect an intelligent system to
display. The traits described below have received the most attention and cover the scope of AI
research.
Reasoning and problem solving
Early researchers developed algorithms that imitated step-by-step reasoning that humans use
when they solve puzzles or make logical deductions. By the late 1980s and 1990s, methods
were developed for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts
from probability and economics.
Many of these algorithms are insufficient for solving large reasoning problems because they
experience a "combinatorial explosion": they became exponentially slower as the problems grew
larger. Even humans rarely use the step-by-step deduction that early AI research could model.
They solve most of their problems using fast, intuitive judgments. Accurate and efficient
reasoning is an unsolved problem.
Knowledge representation

An ontology represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships
between those concepts.
Knowledge representation and knowledge engineering allow AI programs to answer questions
intelligently and make deductions about real-world facts. Formal knowledge representations are
used in content-based indexing and retrieval, scene interpretation, clinical decision
support, knowledge discovery (mining "interesting" and actionable inferences from
large databases), and other areas.
A knowledge base is a body of knowledge represented in a form that can be used by a program.
An ontology is the set of objects, relations, concepts, and properties used by a particular domain
of knowledge. Knowledge bases need to represent things such as: objects, properties,
categories and relations between objects; situations, events, states and time; causes and
effects; knowledge about knowledge (what we know about what other people know); default
reasoning (things that humans assume are true until they are told differently and will remain true
even when other facts are changing); and many other aspects and domains of knowledge.
Among the most difficult problems in knowledge representation are: the breadth of
commonsense knowledge (the set of atomic facts that the average person knows is
enormous); and the sub-symbolic form of most commonsense knowledge (much of what people
know is not represented as "facts" or "statements" that they could express verbally). There is
also the difficulty of knowledge acquisition, the problem of obtaining knowledge for AI
applications.
Planning and decision making
An "agent" is anything that perceives and takes actions in the world. A rational agent has goals
or preferences and takes actions to make them happen. In automated planning, the agent has a
specific goal. In automated decision making, the agent has preferences – there are some
situations it would prefer to be in, and some situations it is trying to avoid. The decision making
agent assigns a number to each situation (called the "utility") that measures how much the agent
prefers it. For each possible action, it can calculate the "expected utility": the utility of all possible
outcomes of the action, weighted by the probability that the outcome will occur. It can then
choose the action with the maximum expected utility.
In classical planning, the agent knows exactly what the effect of any action will be. In most real-
world problems, however, the agent may not be certain about the situation they are in (it is
"unknown" or "unobservable") and it may not know for certain what will happen after each
possible action (it is not "deterministic"). It must choose an action by making a probabilistic guess
and then reassess the situation to see if the action worked.
In some problems, the agent's preferences may be uncertain, especially if there are other agents
or humans involved. These can be learned (e.g., with inverse reinforcement learning) or the
agent can seek information to improve its preferences. Information value theory can be used to
weigh the value of exploratory or experimental actions. The space of possible future actions and
situations is typically intractably large, so the agents must take actions and evaluate situations
while being uncertain what the outcome will be.
A Markov decision process has a transition model that describes the probability that a particular
action will change the state in a particular way, and a reward function that supplies the utility of
each state and the cost of each action. A policy associates a decision with each possible state.
The policy could be calculated (e.g., by iteration), be heuristic, or it can be learned.
Game theory describes rational behavior of multiple interacting agents, and is used in AI
programs that make decisions that involve other agents.
Learning
Machine learning is the study of programs that can improve their performance on a given task
automatically. It has been a part of AI from the beginning.
There are several kinds of machine learning. Unsupervised learning analyzes a stream of data
and finds patterns and makes predictions without any other guidance. Supervised
learning requires a human to label the input data first, and comes in two main
varieties: classification (where the program must learn to predict what category the input belongs
in) and regression (where the program must deduce a numeric function based on numeric input).
In reinforcement learning the agent is rewarded for good responses and punished for bad ones.
The agent learns to choose responses that are classified as "good".[49] Transfer learning is
when the knowledge gained from one problem is applied to a new problem.[50] Deep learning is
a type of machine learning that runs inputs through biologically inspired artificial neural
networks for all of these types of learning.
Computational learning theory can assess learners by computational complexity, by sample
complexity (how much data is required), or by other notions of optimization.
Natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) allows programs to read, write and communicate in human
languages such as English. Specific problems include speech recognition, speech
synthesis, machine translation, information extraction, information retrieval and question
answering.
Early work, based on Noam Chomsky's generative grammar and semantic networks, had
difficulty with word-sense disambiguation[f] unless restricted to small domains called "micro-
worlds" (due to the common sense knowledge problem). Margaret Masterman believed that it
was meaning, and not grammar that was the key to understanding languages, and
that thesauri and not dictionaries should be the basis of computational language structure.
Modern deep learning techniques for NLP include word embedding (representing words, typically
as vectors encoding their meaning), transformers (a deep learning architecture using
an attention mechanism), and others. In 2019, generative pre-trained transformer (or "GPT")
language models began to generate coherent text, and by 2023 these models were able to get
human-level scores on the bar exam, SAT test, GRE test, and many other real-world
applications.
Perception
Machine perception is the ability to use input from sensors (such as cameras, microphones,
wireless signals, active lidar, sonar, radar, and tactile sensors) to deduce aspects of the
world. Computer vision is the ability to analyze visual input.
The field includes speech recognition, image classification, facial recognition, object
recognition, and robotic perception.
Social intelligence
 Kismet, a robot head which was made in the 1990s; a
machine that can recognize and simulate emotions.
Affective computing is an interdisciplinary umbrella that comprises systems that recognize,
interpret, process or simulate human feeling, emotion and mood. For example, some virtual
assistants are programmed to speak conversationally or even to banter humorously; it makes
them appear more sensitive to the emotional dynamics of human interaction, or to otherwise
facilitate human–computer interaction.
However, this tends to give naïve users an unrealistic conception of the intelligence of existing
computer agents. Moderate successes related to affective computing include textual sentiment
analysis and, more recently, multimodal sentiment analysis, wherein AI classifies the affects
displayed by a videotaped subject.
General intelligence
A machine with artificial general intelligence should be able to solve a wide variety of problems
with breadth and versatility similar to human intelligence.
Techniques
AI research uses a wide variety of techniques to accomplish the goals above.
Search and optimization
AI can solve many problems by intelligently searching through many possible solutions. There
are two very different kinds of search used in AI: state space search and local search.
State space search
State space search searches through a tree of possible states to try to find a goal state. For
example, planning algorithms search through trees of goals and subgoals, attempting to find a
path to a target goal, a process called means-ends analysis.
Simple exhaustive searches are rarely sufficient for most real-world problems: the search
space (the number of places to search) quickly grows to astronomical numbers. The result is a
search that is too slow or never completes. "Heuristics" or "rules of thumb" can help to prioritize
choices that are more likely to reach a goal.
Adversarial search is used for game-playing programs, such as chess or Go. It searches through
a tree of possible moves and counter-moves, looking for a winning position.
Local searchIllustration of gradient descent for 3 different starting points. Two parameters
(represented by the plan coordinates) are adjusted in order to minimize the loss function (the
height).
Local search uses mathematical optimization to find a solution to a problem. It begins with some
form of guess and refines it incrementally.
Gradient descent is a type of local search that optimizes a set of numerical parameters by
incrementally adjusting them to minimize a loss function. Variants of gradient descent are
commonly used to train neural networks.
Another type of local search is evolutionary computation, which aims to iteratively improve a set
of candidate solutions by "mutating" and "recombining" them, selecting only the fittest to survive
each generation.
Distributed search processes can coordinate via swarm intelligence algorithms. Two popular
swarm algorithms used in search are particle swarm optimization (inspired by bird flocking)
and ant colony optimization (inspired by ant trails).
Logic
Formal Logic is used for reasoning and knowledge representation.[80] Formal logic comes in two
main forms: propositional logic (which operates on statements that are true or false and
uses logical connectives such as "and", "or", "not" and "implies")[81] and predicate logic (which
also operates on objects, predicates and relations and uses quantifiers such as "Every X is a Y"
and "There are some Xs that are Ys").
Deductive reasoning in logic is the process of proving a new statement (conclusion) from other
statements that are given and assumed to be true (the premises).[83] Proofs can be structured
as proof trees, in which nodes are labelled by sentences, and children nodes are connected to
parent nodes by inference rules.
Given a problem and a set of premises, problem-solving reduces to searching for a proof tree
whose root node is labelled by a solution of the problem and whose leaf nodes are labelled by
premises or axioms. In the case of Horn clauses, problem-solving search can be performed by
reasoning forwards from the premises or backwards from the problem.[84] In the more general
case of the clausal form of first-order logic, resolution is a single, axiom-free rule of inference, in
which a problem is solved by proving a contradiction from premises that include the negation of
the problem to be solved.
Inference in both Horn clause logic and first-order logic is undecidable, and therefore intractable.
However, backward reasoning with Horn clauses, which underpins computation in the logic
programming language Prolog, is Turing complete. Moreover, its efficiency is competitive with
computation in other symbolic programming languages.
Fuzzy logic assigns a "degree of truth" between 0 and 1. It can therefore handle propositions that
are vague and partially true.
Non-monotonic logics, including logic programming with negation as failure, are designed to
handle default reasoning. Other specialized versions of logic have been developed to describe
many complex domains (see knowledge representation above).
Probabilistic methods for uncertain reasoning

A simple Bayesian network, with the associated conditional probability tables

Many problems in AI (including in reasoning, planning, learning, perception, and robotics) require
the agent to operate with incomplete or uncertain information. AI researchers have devised a
number of tools to solve these problems using methods from probability theory and economics.
Bayesian networks are a very general tool that can be used for many problems,
including reasoning (using the Bayesian inference algorithm), learning (using the expectation-
maximization algorithm), planning (using decision networks) and perception (using dynamic
Bayesian networks).
Probabilistic algorithms can also be used for filtering, prediction, smoothing and finding
explanations for streams of data, helping perception systems to analyze processes that occur
over time (e.g., hidden Markov models or Kalman filters).
Precise mathematical tools have been developed that analyze how an agent can make choices
and plan, using decision theory, decision analysis, and information value theory. These tools
include models such as Markov decision processes, dynamic decision networks, game
theory and mechanism design.

Expectation-maximization clustering of Old Faithful eruption data starts from a random guess but
then successfully converges on an accurate clustering of the two physically distinct modes of
eruption.
Classifiers and statistical learning methods
The simplest AI applications can be divided into two types: classifiers (e.g., "if shiny then
diamond"), on one hand, and controllers (e.g., "if diamond then pick up"), on the other
hand. Classifiers are functions that use pattern matching to determine the closest match. They
can be fine-tuned based on chosen examples using supervised learning. Each pattern (also
called an "observation") is labeled with a certain predefined class. All the observations combined
with their class labels are known as a data set. When a new observation is received, that
observation is classified based on previous experience.
There are many kinds of classifiers in use. The decision tree is the simplest and most widely
used symbolic machine learning algorithm. K-nearest neighbor algorithm was the most widely
used analogical AI until the mid-1990s, and Kernel methods such as the support vector
machine (SVM) displaced k-nearest neighbor in the 1990s. The naive Bayes classifier is
reportedly the "most widely used learner" at Google, due in part to its scalability. Neural
networks are also used as classifiers.
Artificial neural networks
A neural network is an interconnected group of nodes, akin to the vast network of neurons in
the human brain.
An artificial neural network is based on a collection of nodes also known as artificial neurons,
which loosely model the neurons in a biological brain. It is trained to recognise patterns; once
trained, it can recognise those patterns in fresh data. There is an input, at least one hidden layer
of nodes and an output. Each node applies a function and once the weight crosses its specified
threshold, the data is transmitted to the next layer. A network is typically called a deep neural
network if it has at least 2 hidden layers.
Learning algorithms for neural networks use local search to choose the weights that will get the
right output for each input during training. The most common training technique is
the backpropagation algorithm. Neural networks learn to model complex relationships between
inputs and outputs and find patterns in data. In theory, a neural network can learn any function.
In feedforward neural networks the signal passes in only one direction. Recurrent neural
networks feed the output signal back into the input, which allows short-term memories of
previous input events. Long short term memory is the most successful network architecture for
recurrent networks. Perceptrons use only a single layer of neurons, deep learning uses multiple
layers. Convolutional neural networks strengthen the connection between neurons that are
"close" to each other – this is especially important in image processing, where a local set of
neurons must identify an "edge" before the network can identify an object.

Deep learning

Deep learning uses several layers of neurons between the network's inputs and outputs. The
multiple layers can progressively extract higher-level features from the raw input. For example,
in image processing, lower layers may identify edges, while higher layers may identify the
concepts relevant to a human such as digits or letters or faces.
Deep learning has profoundly improved the performance of programs in many important
subfields of artificial intelligence, including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language
processing, image classification and others. The reason that deep learning performs so well in so
many applications is not known as of 2023. The sudden success of deep learning in 2012–2015
did not occur because of some new discovery or theoretical breakthrough (deep neural networks
and backpropagation had been described by many people, as far back as the 1950s) but
because of two factors: the incredible increase in computer power (including the hundred-fold
increase in speed by switching to GPUs) and the availability of vast amounts of training data,
especially the giant curated datasets used for benchmark testing, such as ImageNet.
GPT
Generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) are large language models that are based on the
semantic relationships between words in sentences (natural language processing). Text-based
GPT models are pre-trained on a large corpus of text which can be from the internet. The pre-
training consists in predicting the next token (a token being usually a word, subword, or
punctuation). Throughout this pre-training, GPT models accumulate knowledge about the world,
and can then generate human-like text by repeatedly predicting the next token. Typically, a
subsequent training phase makes the model more truthful, useful and harmless, usually with a
technique called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Current GPT models are
still prone to generating falsehoods called "hallucinations", although this can be reduced with
RLHF and quality data. They are used in chatbots, which allow you to ask a question or request
a task in simple text.
Current models and services include: Gemini (formerly
Bard), ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Copilot and LLaMA.[126] Multimodal GPT models can process
different types of data (modalities) such as images, videos, sound and text.
Specialized hardware and software
Main articles: Programming languages for artificial intelligence and Hardware for artificial
intelligence
In the late 2010s, graphics processing units (GPUs) that were increasingly designed with AI-
specific enhancements and used with specialized TensorFlow software, had replaced previously
used central processing unit (CPUs) as the dominant means for large-scale (commercial and
academic) machine learning models' training. Historically, specialized languages, such
as Lisp, Prolog, Python and others, had been used.

Applications

Main article: Applications of artificial intelligence

AI and machine learning technology is used in most of the essential applications of the 2020s,
including: search engines (such as Google Search), targeting online
advertisements, recommendation systems (offered by Netflix, YouTube or Amazon),
driving internet traffic, targeted advertising (AdSense, Facebook), virtual assistants (such
as Siri or Alexa), autonomous vehicles (including drones, ADAS and self-driving cars), automatic
language translation (Microsoft Translator, Google Translate), facial recognition (Apple's Face
ID or Microsoft's DeepFace and Google's FaceNet) and image labeling (used by Facebook,
Apple's iPhoto and TikTok).
Health and medicine
Main article: Artificial intelligence in healthcare
The application of AI in medicine and medical research has the potential to increase patient care
and quality of life. Through the lens of the Hippocratic Oath, medical professionals are ethically
compelled to use AI, if applications can more accurately diagnose and treat patients.
For medical research, AI is an important tool for processing and integrating big data. This is
particularly important for organoid and tissue engineering development which
use microscopy imaging as a key technique in fabrication. It has been suggested that AI can
overcome discrepancies in funding allocated to different fields of research. New AI tools can
deepen our understanding of biomedically relevant pathways. For example, AlphaFold 2 (2021)
demonstrated the ability to approximate, in hours rather than months, the 3D structure of a
protein. In 2023 it was reported that AI guided drug discovery helped find a class of antibiotics
capable of killing two different types of drug-resistant bacteria.
Games
Main article: Game artificial intelligence
Game playing programs have been used since the 1950s to demonstrate and test AI's most
advanced techniques. Deep Blue became the first computer chess-playing system to beat a
reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, on 11 May 1997. In 2011, in a Jeopardy! quiz
show exhibition match, IBM's question answering system, Watson, defeated the two
greatest Jeopardy! champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, by a significant margin. In March
2016, AlphaGo won 4 out of 5 games of Go in a match with Go champion Lee Sedol, becoming
the first computer Go-playing system to beat a professional Go player without handicaps. Then in
2017 it defeated Ke Jie, who was the best Go player in the world. Other programs
handle imperfect-information games, such as the poker-playing
program Pluribus. DeepMind developed increasingly generalistic reinforcement learning models,
such as with MuZero, which could be trained to play chess, Go, or Atari games. In 2019,
DeepMind's AlphaStar achieved grandmaster level in StarCraft II, a particularly challenging real-
time strategy game that involves incomplete knowledge of what happens on the map. In 2021 an
AI agent competed in a PlayStation Gran Turismo competition, winning against four of the
world's best Gran Turismo drivers using deep reinforcement learning.
Military
Main article: Military artificial intelligence
Various countries are deploying AI military applications. The main applications
enhance command and control, communications, sensors, integration and
interoperability. Research is targeting intelligence collection and analysis, logistics, cyber
operations, information operations, and semiautonomous and autonomous vehicles. AI
technologies enable coordination of sensors and effectors, threat detection and identification,
marking of enemy positions, target acquisition, coordination and deconfliction of distributed Joint
Fires between networked combat vehicles involving manned and unmanned teams. AI was
incorporated into military operations in Iraq and Syria.
In November 2023, US Vice President Kamala Harris disclosed a declaration signed by 31
nations to set guardrails for the military use of AI. The commitments include using legal reviews
to ensure the compliance of military AI with international laws, and being cautious and
transparent in the development of this technology.
Generative AI
Main article: Generative artificial intelligence

Vincent van Gogh in watercolour created by generative AI software

In the early 2020s, generative AI gained widespread prominence. In March 2023, 58% of US
adults had heard about ChatGPT and 14% had tried it. The increasing realism and ease-of-use
of AI-based text-to-image generators such as Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion sparked
a trend of viral AI-generated photos. Widespread attention was gained by a fake photo of Pope
Francis wearing a white puffer coat, the fictional arrest of Donald Trump, and a hoax of an attack
on the Pentagon, as well as the usage in professional creative arts.
Industry-specific tasks
There are also thousands of successful AI applications used to solve specific problems for
specific industries or institutions. In a 2017 survey, one in five companies reported they had
incorporated "AI" in some offerings or processes. A few examples are energy storage, medical
diagnosis, military logistics, applications that predict the result of judicial decisions, foreign policy,
or supply chain management.
In agriculture, AI has helped farmers identify areas that need irrigation, fertilization, pesticide
treatments or increasing yield. Agronomists use AI to conduct research and development. AI has
been used to predict the ripening time for crops such as tomatoes, monitor soil moisture, operate
agricultural robots, conduct predictive analytics, classify livestock pig call emotions, automate
greenhouses, detect diseases and pests, and save water.
Artificial intelligence is used in astronomy to analyze increasing amounts of available data and
applications, mainly for "classification, regression, clustering, forecasting, generation, discovery,
and the development of new scientific insights" for example for discovering exoplanets,
forecasting solar activity, and distinguishing between signals and instrumental effects in
gravitational wave astronomy. It could also be used for activities in space such as space
exploration, including analysis of data from space missions, real-time science decisions of
spacecraft, space debris avoidance, and more autonomous operation.

Ethics
Main article: Ethics of artificial intelligence
AI, like any powerful technology, has potential benefits and potential risks. AI may be able to
advance science and find solutions for serious problems: Demis Hassabis of Deep Mind hopes to
"solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else". However, as the use of AI has
become widespread, several unintended consequences and risks have been identified.
Anyone looking to use machine learning as part of real-world, in-production systems needs to
factor ethics into their AI training processes and strive to avoid bias. This is especially true when
using AI algorithms that are inherently unexplainable in deep learning.