What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is software that performs tasks that normally need human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognising images, making predictions and generating text or pictures. Most AI today is narrow: it is good at specific tasks, learns from data, and does not understand the world the way people do.
The full answer
Artificial intelligence (AI) is software that performs tasks that normally need human intelligence: understanding language, recognising images, making predictions, and generating text, code, images or audio.
Almost all AI in use today is narrow AI. It is built or trained for a family of tasks and can be superhuman at them, such as playing chess or translating text, but it does not generalise to everything the way a person does. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are the best-known examples. They are large language models trained on huge amounts of text.
AI is not one technology. It is a field with several approaches, and the one behind today's boom is machine learning: systems that learn patterns from data instead of following hand-written rules.
The terms AI, AGI, superintelligence and ASI describe different levels of ability, and people often mix them up. Narrow AI exists today; AGI and superintelligence do not yet.