Definition
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the field that aims to build machines capable of performing tasks that, when done by humans, are considered to require intelligence — reasoning, perception, language understanding, learning, planning. The field has cycled through symbolic, connectionist, statistical, and deep-learning approaches since its founding at Dartmouth in 1956.
Why it matters
How it works
Modern AI is mostly built from large neural networks trained on enormous datasets using gradient descent. The networks learn continuous representations of inputs (text, images, sound) that support flexible transfer to new tasks. Symbolic methods remain useful where the domain is well-defined (chess engines, theorem provers, expert systems) and as augmentations to learned systems (retrieval, tool use). The combination of learned representations and symbolic structure is an active frontier.