At its most simple, AI is intelligence generated by computers rather than humans.
It was established as an academic discipline in the 1950s and since then, computer scientists have worked to create software programming rules (known as algorithms) to enable machines to learn, reason, generalise and infer meaning – tasks that would normally require human intelligence.
What types of AI are there?
Narrow AI
This is where most recent research and development has focused. Narrow AI is AI designed to perform a specific task, or set of tasks, which currently need human brain capacity and specialist knowledge. Think virtual assistants, such as Siri or Alexa, or recommendation algorithms on websites like Amazon and Spotify – these all use narrow AI to match past patterns of behaviour and make predictions about future interactions.
General AI
Artificial general intelligence is AI that can learn, think and act the way humans do. Although yet to be created, in theory it could perform a wider array of tasks than Narrow AI and perform creative actions that previously only humans could.
Generative AI (Gen AI)
Based on Large Language Models (LLMs) Gen AI is a variant of AI that can create written or visual content in response to human prompting – think ChatGPT. This is the sort of AI we’ll increasingly be exposed to both in our home and work lives.
Artificial general intelligence is AI that can learn, think and act the way humans do. Although yet to be created, in theory it could perform a wider array of tasks than Narrow AI and perform creative actions that previously only humans could.
Large Language Models (LLMs)
LLMs perform natural language processing tasks, like generating and classifying text, answering questions and translating content. They’re trained on huge volumes of text data, learning patterns and relationships within it, with the aim of predicting the next likely word in a sentence, based on its context – like when Google predicts your next word when typing in their search bar.
Machine Learning (ML)
Machine learning is a branch of AI that focuses on the use of data and algorithms to imitate the way that humans learn, gradually improving its accuracy.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
The ability of a computer to understand, interpret, and generate human-like text, enabling interaction between humans and machines using natural language.
Robotics
Combines AI and physical robots to perform tasks.
Computer vision
Where machines interpret and understand visual information from the world such as images and videos.
What's an algorithm?
An algorithm is a set of rules or instructions, used by a computer to get the expected output from the given input. For example, if a customer has a set of circumstances that are input to a financial health check, the algorithms in the financial health check system will work to supply a list of answers and solutions relevant to the customer’s circumstances.
AI and Data Ethics
Data ethics ensures protection, security, privacy and transparency while organisations collect, process, share and use the data. AI ethics furthers data ethics to ensure the AI algorithms and systems built on data are amongst other things fair and unbiased.
