What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Put simply, AI is getting computers to act like humans in terms of problem-solving and decision-making. With the use of large datasets and computer programs, AI machines are made to mimic the intelligence and actions of human beings.

AI is used for a number of everyday activities. This includes speech recognition (like Siri and Alexa); customer service (think how many social media company pages use AI bots to handle their incoming customer requests); 

Computer vision (as with image searching on Google); recommendations (like how Netflix and Spotify give you customized recs based on your prior activity); and automated stock trading (AI-driven trading platforms that can process thousands of trades a day without human intervention). 

On a more advanced level, AI is also used to steer driverless cars.

There are two types of AI: strong and weak. Don’t be fooled: weak AI is not necessarily the less powerful of the two, but rather refers to AI systems that are programmed only to fulfill specific tasks, like Siri or Alexa. 

Also called narrow AI, the tech is a set of advanced methods to analyze data and use it to extract patterns to predict and optimize certain values in a more sophisticated way than traditional data analysis tools can, Radwan told us last week. 

Strong AI, meanwhile, refers to the concept of AI systems that have an intelligence equal to humans, which don’t yet exist. Strong AI would boast a self-aware consciousness with the ability to solve problems, learn, and plan for the future, IBM writes.