What is artificial intelligence (AI)?

Despite deep learning scoring a string of major successes over the past decade, few have caught the public imagination in the same way as ChatGPT's uncannily human conversational capabilities.

Most machine learning systems are trained to solve a particular problem —, such as detecting faces in a video feed or translating from one language to another —, to a superhuman level, in that they are much faster and perform better than a human could.

This ability to generalize what they've learned to solve many different problems has led some to speculate LLMs could be a step toward AGI, including DeepMind scientists in a paper published last year.

AGI refers to a hypothetical future AI capable of mastering any cognitive task a human can, reasoning abstractly about problems, and adapting to new situations without specific training.

According to detractors, these models have simply memorized vast amounts of information, which they recombine in ways that give the false impression of deeper understanding; it means they are limited by training data and are not fundamentally different from other narrow AI tools.

AI-powered recommendation algorithms decide what you watch on Netflix or YouTube — while translation models make it possible to instantly convert a web page from a foreign language to your own.