Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines,

particularly computer systems. 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.

Some high-profile applications of AI 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."[2][3]

The various subfields 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.[a] 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.[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,[7][8] followed by periods of disappointment and loss of funding, known as AI
winter.[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 hundreds of billions of dollars were being invested in AI (known as the "AI boom"). The
widespread use of AI in the 21st century exposed several unintended consequences and harms in the
present and raised concerns about its risks and 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 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).[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; a machine that can recognize and simulate emotions [64]
Affective computing is an interdisciplinary umbrella that comprises systems that recognize, interpret,
process, or simulate human feeling, emotion, and mood.[65] For example, some virtual assistants are