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Glossary

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Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the capability of computational systems to
perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning,
reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of
research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that
enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to
take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. [1] Such
machines may be called AIs.

High-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google

Search); recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix); virtual
assistants (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."[2][3]

Various subfields of AI research are centered around particular goals and the use of
particular tools. The traditional goals of AI research include
learning, reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, natural language
processing, perception, and support for robotics.[a] General intelligence—the ability to
complete any task performed by a human on an at least equal level—is among the
field's long-term goals.[4] 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.[b] AI also draws
upon psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, and other fields.[5]

Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956, [6] and the field
went through multiple cycles of optimism throughout its history,[7][8] followed by
periods of disappointment and loss of funding, known as AI winters.[9][10] Funding and
interest vastly increased after 2012 when deep learning outperformed previous AI
techniques.[11] This growth accelerated further after 2017 with the transformer
architecture,[12] and by the early 2020s many billions of dollars were being invested in
AI and the field experienced rapid ongoing progress in what has become known as
the AI boom. The emergence of advanced generative AI in the midst of the AI boom
and its ability to create and modify content exposed several unintended
consequences and harms in the present and raised concerns about the risks of
AI and its long-term effects in the future, prompting discussions about regulatory
policies to ensure the safety and benefits of the technology.

Goals
The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken into
subproblems. 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. [a]

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.[13] By the late
1980s and 1990s, methods were developed for dealing with uncertain or incomplete
information, employing concepts from probability and economics.[14]

Many of these algorithms are insufficient for solving large reasoning problems
because they experience a "combinatorial explosion": They become exponentially
slower as the problems grow.[15] 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.[16] 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[17] 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,[18] scene interpretation,[19] clinical decision support,[20] knowledge discovery
(mining "interesting" and actionable inferences from large databases),[21] and other
areas.[22]

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.[23] Knowledge bases need to represent things
such as objects, properties, categories, and relations between objects; [24] situations,
events, states, and time;[25] causes and effects;[26] knowledge about knowledge (what
we know about what other people know); [27] default reasoning (things that humans
assume are true until they are told differently and will remain true even when other
facts are changing);[28] 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);[29] 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).[16] There is also the difficulty of knowledge acquisition, the problem
of obtaining knowledge for AI applications. [c]
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.[d][32] In automated planning, the agent has a specific goal.[33] 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.[34]

In classical planning, the agent knows exactly what the effect of any action will
be.[35] 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.[36]

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.[37] Information value theory can be used to weigh the value of
exploratory or experimental actions.[38] The space of possible future actions and
situations is typically intractably large, so the agents must take actions and evaluate
situations while being uncertain of 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.[39]

Game theory describes the rational behavior of multiple interacting agents and is
used in AI programs that make decisions that involve other agents. [40]

Learning
Machine learning is the study of programs that can improve their performance on a
given task automatically.[41] It has been a part of AI from the beginning. [e]

There are several kinds of machine learning. Unsupervised learning analyzes a

stream of data and finds patterns and makes predictions without any other
guidance.[44] Supervised learning requires labeling the training data with the expected
answers, 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). [45]

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".[46] Transfer learning is when the knowledge gained from one problem is
applied to a new problem.[47] Deep learning is a type of machine learning that runs
inputs through biologically inspired artificial neural networks for all of these types of
learning.[48]

Computational learning theory can assess learners by computational complexity,

by sample complexity (how much data is required), or by other notions
of optimization.[49]

Natural language processing

Natural language processing (NLP)[50] 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.[51]

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[29]). 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),[52] transformers (a deep learning
architecture using an attention mechanism),[53] and others.[54] In 2019, generative pre-
trained transformer (or "GPT") language models began to generate coherent
text,[55][56] 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.[57]

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.[58]

The field includes speech recognition,[59] image classification,[60] facial

recognition, object recognition,[61]object tracking,[62] and robotic perception.[63]

Social intelligence
 Kismet, a robot head which was made in the 1990s; it is a
machine that can recognize and simulate emotions. [64]
Affective computing is a field that comprises systems that recognize, interpret,
process, or simulate human feeling, emotion, and mood.[65] 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.[66] Moderate successes related to affective computing
include textual sentiment analysis and, more recently, multimodal sentiment
analysis, wherein AI classifies the effects displayed by a videotaped subject.[67]

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.[4]