What is AI?

Computers got a lot smarter between 1968 and 2017. Artificial intelligence is not new, but it’s increasingly influential. We’ll return to definitions later, but for now, think of AI as the capacity of a machine to simulate human intelligence.

AI is already ubiquitous in your day-to-day life, ranking blue links on Google searches, blocking spam from your work inbox, providing your boss with marketing and sales leads, suggesting Amazon products and Netflix shows, sorting Facebook and TikTok feeds, and navigating you from📍A to📍B. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Now that we have your attention, we’ll turn down the galaxy-brain knob a bit. This guide provides the overview of what you need to know about AI today. No more, no less.

Despite how far it’s come, AI is far from general intelligence or its anthropomorphized pop culture depictions.