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What is artificial intelligence?

1 min For the Curious AI Basics
TL;DRThe short answer

Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science focused on building systems that can perform tasks which normally require human intelligence.

The longer story

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science focused on building systems that can perform tasks which normally require human intelligence, things like understanding language, recognising images, making decisions, and solving problems. Modern AI works by learning patterns from large amounts of data rather than following hand-written rules. It ranges from narrow systems that do one job well (like filtering spam) to more general tools like ChatGPT that can handle a wide variety of tasks.

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