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, closely mirrored in the EU AI Act, describes an AI system as a machine-based system that operates with varying levels of autonomy and may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment. It 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. These models are increasingly multimodal, and many are trained to reason step by step before they answer.

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).

Related Resources

Course

Building a Neural Network & Making Predictions With Python AI

In this step-by-step course, you'll build a neural network from scratch as an introduction to the world of artificial intelligence (AI) in Python. You'll learn how to train your neural network and make accurate predictions based on a given dataset.

intermediate data-science machine-learning

For additional information on related topics, take a look at the following resources:

• Python AI: How to Build a Neural Network & Make Predictions (Tutorial)
• AI Coding Agents Guide: A Map of the Four Workflow Types (Tutorial)
• Python Deep Learning: PyTorch vs Tensorflow (Course)
• Generative Adversarial Networks: Build Your First Models (Tutorial)
• Python AI: How to Build a Neural Network & Make Predictions (Quiz)
• AI Coding Agents Guide: A Map of the Four Workflow Types (Quiz)