Technology that lets computers do things that used to need a human mind.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the umbrella name for getting computers to do jobs that used to need human thinking. That covers spotting a cat in a photo, understanding speech, translating, playing Go and writing.
The term is usually traced to a 1955 proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth College. Early AI followed rules people wrote by hand; most AI today is built with machine learning, where the computer works out the rules from lots of examples.
So AI isn't one machine. Inside AI sits machine learning, inside that sits deep learning, and inside that sit today's large language models.
Think of it like this
AI is like the word "sports". Inside sports there are ball games, and inside ball games there's soccer. When someone says "AI", it helps to ask which kind they mean.
For example
When your phone's photo app gathers all your beach pictures by itself, that's AI at work.
Records about this
Source-checked moments from AI history.
The document that gave the field its name. It led to the workshop the following year, in 1956