What Exactly Is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence, AI for its acronym in English and much of the news already revolves around this concept. Everyone talks about it, but few know what it is or what it is used for. In this article we explain what exactly AI consists of.

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence AI could be considered as one of the most important revolutions in the technology of recent times. The large amount of data that we have, the increase in computing capacity, advances in technology, and the increasing need for digitization by companies, make it play a very important role in today’s society. In this new technological era, companies and developers make use of the concepts of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL), but generally, they do it in a loose concise way and mixing the terms.

It is important to know the differences that exist between these concepts to know what techniques they use and the properties that are related to them. That is why the first thing we are going to do is clarify these concepts with the following diagram and its subsequent explanation. As we can see in the image above, Artificial Intelligence comprises those techniques and procedures that try to equip machines with intelligence. 

Second, machine learning, often used as a synonym for AI, is a subfield of AI that addresses algorithms capable of learning by themselves. Finally, deep learning is a subset of ML applied to large amounts of data and based mainly on the use of neural networks. 

Definition Of Artificial Intelligence

The origins of the concept of AI we have to go to the 1950s, where Minsky, considered one of the fathers of the field together with McCarthy, defined it as ¨the science of making machines capable of performing tasks that, in the case to be made by a human, they require a certain intelligence¨.

The creator  believes that “intelligence is linked to the ability of a system to adapt and improvise in a new environment, how it generalizes knowledge and how it is applied in unknown settings”. With this definition, we can cover modern systems that make use of AI. An example of these systems can be virtual assistants, which are capable of carrying out a series of specific tasks, with speech recognition being the main one to highlight.

In summary, we can say that intelligent systems are those that demonstrate at least some of the following behaviors associated with human intelligence: reasoning, problem-solving, learning, planning, perception, social intelligence, or creativity.