What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science focused on building systems that can do things only humans used to be able to do: recognize images, understand language, make decisions, and learn from data.

What does AI include?

AI is a big umbrella that covers many sub-fields:

• Machine Learning — machines learn from data instead of being hard-coded
• Deep Learning — machine learning that uses many-layered neural networks
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) — processing human language
• Computer Vision — understanding images and video
• Generative AI — creating new content (text, images, video, code)

When people say “AI” in 2026, they usually mean Generative AI — ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, Gemini.

AI vs ML vs LLM

AI (the entire field)
└── Machine Learning (how AI learns from data)
    └── Deep Learning (ML using neural networks)
        └── LLM (large language models — e.g. GPT, Claude)

Strong AI vs Weak AI

• Narrow AI / Weak AI: good at one specific task (Google Translate translates text, AlphaGo plays Go). Every real-world AI today falls into this category.
• General AI / Strong AI / AGI: as smart as a human across every domain. Doesn’t exist yet — still a research goal.

Further reading

• LLM — the most common kind of AI today
• Machine Learning — the foundation of modern AI
• Generative AI — AI that creates content