What is AI? 🤖
Understanding the systems that are reshaping our world
💡 What is AI? (Simple Explanation)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to computer systems that can do things humans usually do — like:
- Understanding what you say
- Recognizing faces in photos
- Deciding what movie you might like
- Creating art, music, or writing
The key idea: Instead of programming every rule, we let computers learn from examples.
How Does AI Learn?
Data → Patterns → Decisions
- Feed the AI lots of examples ("Here are 1 million cat photos")
- Let it find patterns ("Cats have pointy ears, whiskers, and...")
- Use patterns to make decisions ("This new photo has pointy ears, so it's probably a cat!")
Two Types of AI
Narrow AI (What we have today):
- Great at ONE specific task
- Beats humans at chess, but can't make toast
- Examples: Siri, Netflix recommendations, self-driving features
General AI (What we DON'T have):
- Good at EVERYTHING humans do
- Can learn any new task
- Status: Doesn't exist yet (maybe decades away)
💡 Key Ideas
Data → Models → Decisions: AI systems learn patterns from data and use them to make predictions or generate outputs.
Narrow vs. General: Today's AI is mostly narrow — great at specific tasks, not everything humans do.
Learning Paradigms: Supervised, Unsupervised, Reinforcement, and Self-Supervised.