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 which enable machines to
perceive their environment and uses learning and intelligence to take actions that
maximize their chances of achieving defined goals.[1] Such machines may be called
AIs.

AI technology is widely used throughout industry, government, and science. Some

high-profile applications 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).[2] 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."[3]
[4]

Alan Turing was the first person to conduct substantial research in the field that
he called machine intelligence.[5] Artificial intelligence was founded as an
academic discipline in 1956.[6] 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
surpassed all previous AI techniques,[11] and after 2017 with the transformer
architecture.[12] This led to the AI boom of the early 2020s, with companies,
universities, and laboratories overwhelmingly based in the United States pioneering
significant advances in artificial intelligence.[13]

The growing use of artificial intelligence in the 21st century is influencing a

societal and economic shift towards increased automation, data-driven decision-
making, and the integration of AI systems into various economic sectors and areas
of life, impacting job markets, healthcare, government, industry, and education.
This raises questions about the long-term effects, ethical implications, and risks
of AI, prompting discussions about regulatory policies to ensure the safety and
benefits of the technology.

The various sub-fields 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.[14]

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.[15]

Goals
The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken into
sub-problems. 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.[16] By the late
1980s and 1990s, methods were developed for dealing with uncertain or incomplete
information, employing concepts from probability and economics.[17]

Many of these algorithms are insufficient for solving large reasoning problems
because they experience a "combinatorial explosion": they became exponentially
slower as the problems grew larger.[18] 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.[19] 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[20] 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,[21]
scene interpretation,[22] clinical decision support,[23] knowledge discovery
(mining "interesting" and actionable inferences from large databases),[24] and
other areas.[25]

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.[26] Knowledge bases need to represent
things such as: objects, properties, categories and relations between objects;[27]
situations, events, states and time;[28] causes and effects;[29] knowledge about
knowledge (what we know about what other people know);[30] default reasoning
(things that humans assume are true until they are told differently and will remain
true even when other facts are changing);[31] 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);[32] 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).[19] 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][35] In
automated planning, the agent has a specific goal.[36] 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.[37]

In classical planning, the agent knows exactly what the effect of any action will
be.[38] 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.[39]

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.[40] Information value theory can be used to weigh the value of
exploratory or experimental actions.[41] The space of possible future actions and
situations is typically intractably large, so the agents must take actions and
evaluate situations while being uncertain 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.[42]

Game theory describes rational behavior of multiple interacting agents, and is used
in AI programs that make decisions that involve other agents.[43]

Learning
Machine learning is the study of programs that can improve their performance on a
given task automatically.[44] 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.
[47] 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).[48]

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".[49]
Transfer learning is when the knowledge gained from one problem is applied to a new
problem.[50] Deep learning is a type of machine learning that runs inputs through
biologically inspired artificial neural networks for all of these types of
learning.[51]

Computational learning theory can assess learners by computational complexity, by

sample complexity (how much data is required), or by other notions of optimization.
[52]

Natural language processing

Natural language processing (NLP)[53] 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.[54]

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[32]). 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),[55] transformers (a deep learning
architecture using an attention mechanism),[56] and others.[57] In 2019, generative
pre-trained transformer (or "GPT") language models began to generate coherent text,
[58][59] 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.[60]

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.[61]

The field includes speech recognition,[62] image classification,[63] facial

recognition, object recognition,[64] and robotic perception.[65]

Social intelligence

Kismet, a robot head which was made in the 1990s; a machine that can recognize and
simulate emotions.[66]
Affective computing is an interdisciplinary umbrella that comprises systems that
recognize, interpret, process or simulate human feeling, emotion and mood.[67] For
example, some virtual assistants are programmed to speak conversationally or even
to banter humorously; it makes them appear more sensitive to the emotional dynamics
of human interaction, or to otherwise facilitate human–computer interaction.

However, this tends to give naïve users an unrealistic conception of the

intelligence of existing computer agents.[68] Moderate successes related to
affective computing include textual sentiment analysis and, more recently,
multimodal sentiment analysis, wherein AI classifies the affects displayed by a
videotaped subject.[69]

General intelligence
A machine with artificial general intelligence should be able to solve a wide
variety of problems with breadth and versatility similar to human intelligence.[14]