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Artificial intelligence (AI) is 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 engineering, mathematics, and 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 maximise their chances of achieving defined goals. High-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines, chatbots, virtual assistants, autonomous vehicles, play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess and Go), and content generation (e.g. images, audio, and videos). The traditional goals of AI research include learning, reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, natural language processing, and perception, as well as support for robotics. To reach these goals, AI researchers use techniques including state space search and mathematical optimisation, formal logic, artificial neural networks, and methods based on statistics, operations research, and economics. Some companies, such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta, aim to create artificial general intelligence (AGI)—AI that can complete nearly any cognitive task at least as well as a human. Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956. Funding and interest increased substantially after 2012, when graphics processing units (GPUs) started being used to accelerate neural networks, and deep learning outperformed previous AI techniques.

Deep learning is a type of machine learning that runs inputs through biologically inspired artificial neural networks for all of these types of learning.

A machine with artificial general intelligence (AGI) would be able to solve a wide variety of problems with breadth and versatility similar to human intelligence.

Deep learning has profoundly improved the performance of programs in many important subfields of artificial intelligence, including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, image classification, and others.

Machines with intelligence have the potential to use their intelligence to make ethical decisions.

In 2024, the Council of Europe created the first international legally binding treaty on AI, called the "Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law".

They developed several areas of research that would become part of AI, such as McCulloch and Pitts design for "artificial neurons" in 1943, and Turing's influential 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', which introduced the Turing test and showed that "machine intelligence" was plausible. Artificial intelligence laboratories were set up at a number of British and U.S. universities in the latter 1950s and early 1960s. Researchers in the 1960s and the 1970s were convinced that their methods would eventually succeed in creating a machine with general intelligence and considered this the goal of their field. In 1967 Marvin Minsky agreed, writing that "within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved". By 2000, solutions developed by AI researchers were being widely used, although in the 1990s they were rarely described as "artificial intelligence" (a tendency known as the AI effect).

"Aeronautical engineering texts", they wrote, "do not define the goal of their field as making 'machines that fly so exactly like pigeons that they can fool other pigeons.'" AI founder John McCarthy agreed, writing that "Artificial intelligence is not, by definition, simulation of human intelligence". Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach defines it as the study of agents that perceive their environment and take actions that maximise their chances of achieving defined goals.

The unprecedented success of statistical machine learning in the 2010s eclipsed all other approaches (so much so that some sources, especially in the business world, use the term "artificial intelligence" to mean "machine learning with neural networks").

Edward Fredkin argues that "artificial intelligence is the next step in evolution", an idea first proposed by Samuel Butler's "Darwin among the Machines" as far back as 1863, and expanded upon by George Dyson in his 1998 book Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence.

Quick Facts

• Some companies, such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta, aim to create artificial general intelligence (AGI)—AI that can complete nearly any cognitive task at least as well as a human.
• To reach these goals, AI researchers use techniques including state space search and mathematical optimisation, formal logic, artificial neural networks, and methods based on statistics, operations research, and economics.
• It is a field of research in engineering, mathematics, and 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 maximise their chances of achieving defined goals.
• A machine with artificial general intelligence (AGI) would be able to solve a wide variety of problems with breadth and versatility similar to human intelligence.
• Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Artificial intelligence". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.