What is AI?

AI Before AIEons ago (i.e. before 2012), “AI” referred to an assortment of techniques that people hoped would get computers to be intelligent, even if it didn’t involve any “learning” by the machine. For example, Deep Blue was considered a breakthrough in AI in the 1990s, even though it consisted of hand-coded chess heuristics combined with a powerful computer for searching through hundreds of millions of moves per second. My textbook on artificial intelligence from 2012 (published in 2009) described many different “hand-coded” techniques to have computers solve problems, and had only few chapters on what AI soon came to mean. Machine Learning & Neural NetsMachine Learning (ML) - Give a machine enough structured data with labels, and it can learn patterns from that data using simple methods such as linear regression. Early ML techniques go back many decades, but it was in the 2000s that large tech companies really began to use them, such as in recommendation systems on Amazon and…