artificial intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the field of building machines and software that perform tasks associated with human intelligence, such as perception, reasoning, learning, decision making, and natural language use. The word also names the systems themselves. The OECD definition, adopted verbatim into the EU AI Act, describes an AI system as a machine-based system that operates with varying levels of autonomy and infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions.

Modern AI spans symbolic approaches that manipulate explicit rules and knowledge, statistical and machine-learning methods that learn patterns from data, and hybrid systems that integrate both symbolic reasoning and data-driven learning. Most of today’s headline systems sit in the machine-learning branch: deep neural networks trained at scale, including the foundation models and large language models behind current chat assistants and AI coding tools.

Use cases of AI include search and recommendation, computer vision, speech and language processing, robotics, planning, generative AI, autonomous agents that reason, plan, and call tools, and AI-assisted code generation. AI practice distinguishes narrow AI systems, which excel at specific tasks, from the broader, still-hypothetical goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI).