What is artificial intelligence and how does it work?

By The editorial team · Editor2 min read
What is artificial intelligence and how does it work?

AI systems learn patterns from large amounts of data and use them to make predictions or generate content.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is software that performs tasks which normally need human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognising images or making predictions. Most modern AI works by learning patterns from large amounts of data instead of following hand-written rules.

Today's chatbots and image tools are a type called generative AI.

How it learns

A model is trained on huge collections of text, images or other data. During training it adjusts millions or billions of internal settings so its outputs get closer to the right answer.

How it responds

A text model predicts what words are most likely to come next, based on your input and what it learned. It does not look things up or "know" things the way a person does.

Limits

AI can sound confident while being wrong, and can reflect biases in its training data, so check important facts.

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