• Question: whats artifical intellegence

    Asked by type1week on 14 Jun 2024.
    • Photo: Neil Barnby

      Neil Barnby answered on 14 Jun 2024:


      Artificial intelligence (AI) is the field of computer science focused on creating systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. This includes things like recognising speech, understanding natural language, making decisions, and even visual perception.
      AI systems learn from data, improving their performance over time through techniques like machine learning. For example, your smartphone’s voice assistant or recommendation systems on streaming services use AI to understand your preferences and provide better suggestions.
      Essentially, AI aims to create machines that can think, learn, and adapt like humans. Although currently machines do not think as such as the definition of thinking is to consider or reason about something and machines neither consider or reason. The thinking part may come if we manage to develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), but that is some way off yet. That is the type of AI that is usually depicted in movies.

    • Photo: Gabrielle Baumberg

      Gabrielle Baumberg answered on 18 Jul 2024:


      That’s a big question! You might have heard the term Machine Learning alongside Artificial Intelligence, and actually AI is a subset of ML. This topic area is all about trying to get the most from our data, using it to make predictions, or make general assumptions based on a limited amount of data. When humans do this, we tend to bias the results, or look for patterns that don’t actually play a bit role in prediction.

      We can manually provide an algorithm for our machine learning model to apply to our data, *or* we can ask the machine learning model to create its own algorithm – this is when it starts to be called artificial intelligence. The most complex AI models are called ‘black box’ methods, meaning that humans cannot understand the actual connections they make between the data! One type of AI model is a neural network model, that approaches the way that a real brain is set up with many interconnected neurons. It still works very differently to a brain, but it does produce some amazing results, like the Large Language Models that are behind chatGPT! LLMs are very good at predicting which word should be next in a sentence or paragraph, but they are terrible at doing math questions for you.

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