Artificial Intelligence

Generated on: 17 July 2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically
associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and
decision-making. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and
software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to
take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. There is debate over whether
artificial intelligence exhibits genuine intelligence or merely simulates it by imitating human-
like behaviors. High-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google
Search); recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix); virtual assistants (e.g.,
Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo); generative and creative tools
(e.g., language models and AI art); and superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess
and Go). However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of cutting edge AI has
filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes
useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore." Various subfields of AI research are
centered around particular goals and the use of particular tools. The traditional goals of AI
research include learning, reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, natural language
processing, perception, and support for robotics. To reach these goals, AI researchers have adapted
and integrated a wide range of techniques, including search and mathematical optimization, formal
logic, artificial neural networks, and methods based on statistics, operations research, and
economics. AI also draws upon psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, and other fields.
Some companies, such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta, aim to create artificial general
intelligence (AGI)—AI that can complete virtually any cognitive task at least as well as a human.
Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956, and the field went through
multiple cycles of optimism throughout its history, followed by periods of disappointment and loss
of funding, known as AI winters. Funding and interest vastly increased after 2012 when graphics
processing units started being used to accelerate neural networks and deep learning outperformed
previous AI techniques. This growth accelerated further after 2017 with the transformer
architecture. In the 2020s, an ongoing period of rapid progress in advanced generative AI became
known as the AI boom. Generative AI's ability to create and modify content has led to several
unintended consequences and harms, while raising ethical concerns about AI's long-term effects and
potential existential risks, prompting discussions about regulatory policies to ensure the safety
and benefits of the technology. == Goals == The general problem of simulating (or creating)
intelligence has been broken into subproblems. These consist of particular traits or capabilities
that researchers expect an intelligent system to display. The traits described below have received
the most attention and cover the scope of AI research. === Reasoning and problem-solving === Early
researchers developed algorithms that imitated step-by-step reasoning that humans use when they
solve puzzles or make logical deductions. By the late 1980s and 1990s, methods were developed for
dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts from probability and economics.
Many of these algorithms are insufficient for solving large reasoning problems because they
experience a "combinatorial explosion": They become exponentially slower as the problems grow. Even
humans rarely use the step-by-step deduction that early AI research could model. They solve most of
their problems using fast, intuitive judgments. Accurate and efficient reasoning is an unsolved
problem. === Knowledge representation === Knowledge representation and knowledge engineering
allow AI programs to answer questions intelligently and make deductions about real-world facts.
Formal knowledge representations are used in content-based indexing and retrieval, scene
interpretation, clinical decision support, knowledge discovery (mining "interesting" and actionable
inferences from large databases), and other areas. A knowledge base is a body of knowledge
represented in a form that can be used by a program. An ontology is the set of objects, relations,
concepts, and properties used by a particular domain of knowledge. Knowledge bases need to represen
things such as objects, properties, categories, and relations between objects; situations, events,
states, and time; causes and effects; knowledge about knowledge (what we know about what other
people know); default reasoning (things that humans assume are true until they are told differently
and will remain true even when other facts are changing); and many other aspects and domains of
knowledge. Among the most difficult problems in knowledge representation are the breadth of
commonsense knowledge (the set of atomic facts that the average person knows is enormous); and the
sub-symbolic form of most commonsense knowledge (much of what people know is not represented as
"facts" or "statements" that they could express verbally). There is also the difficulty of knowledge
acquisition, the problem of obtaining knowledge for AI applications. === Planning and decision-
making === An "agent" is anything that perceives and takes actions in the world. A rational agent
has goals or preferences and takes actions to make them happen. In automated planning, the agent ha
a specific goal. In automated decision-making, the agent has preferences—there are some situations
it would prefer to be in, and some situations it is trying to avoid. The decision-making agent
assigns a number to each situation (called the "utility") that measures how much the agent prefers
it. For each possible action, it can calculate the "expected utility": the utility of all possible
outcomes of the action, weighted by the probability that the outcome will occur. It can then choose
the action with the maximum expected utility. In classical planning, the agent knows exactly what
the effect of any action will be. In most real-world problems, however, the agent may not be certain
about the situation they are in (it is "unknown" or "unobservable") and it may not know for certain
what will happen after each possible action (it is not "deterministic"). It must choose an action by
making a probabilistic guess and then reassess the situation to see if the action worked. In some
problems, the agent's preferences may be uncertain, especially if there are other agents or humans
involved. These can be learned (e.g., with inverse reinforcement learning), or the agent can seek
information to improve its preferences. Information value theory can be used to weigh the value of
exploratory or experimental actions. The space of possible future actions and situations is
typically intractably large, so the agents must take actions and evaluate situations while being
uncertain of what the outcome will be. A Markov decision process has a transition model that
describes the probability that a particular action will change the state in a particular way and a
reward function that supplies the utility of each state and the cost of each action. A policy
associates a decision with each possible state. The policy could be calculated (e.g., by iteration),
be heuristic, or it can be learned. Game theory describes the rational behavior of multiple
interacting agents and is used in AI programs that make decisions that involve other agents. ===
Learning === Machine learning is the study of programs that can improve their performance on a given
task automatically. It has been a part of AI from the beginning. There are several kinds of machine
learning. Unsupervised learning analyzes a stream of data and finds patterns and makes predictions
without any other guidance. Supervised learning requires labeling the training data with the
expected answers, and comes in two main varieties: classification (where the program must learn to
predict what category the input belongs in) and regression (where the program must deduce a numeric
function based on numeric input). In reinforcement learning, the agent is rewarded for good
responses and punished for bad ones. The agent learns to choose responses that are classified as
"good". Transfer learning is when the knowledge gained from one problem is applied to a new problem.
Deep learning is a type of machine learning that runs inputs through biologically inspired
artificial neural networks for all of these types of learning. Computational learning theory can
assess learners by computational complexity, by sample complexity (how much data is required), or by
other notions of optimization. === Natural language processing === Natural language processing
(NLP) allows programs to read, write and communicate in human languages. Specific problems include
speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, information extraction, information
retrieval and question answering. Early work, based on Noam Chomsky's generative grammar and
semantic networks, had difficulty with word-sense disambiguation unless restricted to small domains
called "micro-worlds" (due to the common sense knowledge problem). Margaret Masterman believed th
it was meaning and not grammar that was the key to understanding languages, and that thesauri and
not dictionaries should be the basis of computational language structure. Modern deep learning
techniques for NLP include word embedding (representing words, typically as vectors encoding their
meaning), transformers (a deep learning architecture using an attention mechanism), and others. In
2019, generative pre-trained transformer (or "GPT") language models began to generate coherent text,
and by 2023, these models were able to get human-level scores on the bar exam, SAT test, GRE test,
and many other real-world applications. === Perception === Machine perception is the ability to
use input from sensors (such as cameras, microphones, wireless signals, active lidar, sonar, radar,
and tactile sensors) to deduce aspects of the world. Computer vision is the ability to analyze
visual input. The field includes speech recognition, image classification, facial recognition,
object recognition, object tracking, and robotic perception. === Social intelligence ===
Affective computing is a field that comprises systems that recognize, interpret, process, or
simulate human feeling, emotion, and mood. For example, some virtual assistants are programmed to
speak conversationally or even to banter humorously; it makes them appear more sensitive to the
emotional dynamics of human interaction, or to otherwise facilitate human–computer interaction.
However, this tends to give naïve users an unrealistic conception of the intelligence of existing
computer agents. Moderate successes related to affective computing include textual sentiment
analysis and, more recently, multimodal sentiment analysis, wherein AI classifies the effects
displayed by a videotaped subject. === General intelligence === A machine with artificial general
intelligence would be able to solve a wide variety of problems with breadth and versatility similar
to human intelligence. == Techniques == AI research uses a wide variety of techniques to
accomplish the goals above. === Search and optimization === AI can solve many problems by
intelligently searching through many possible solutions. There are two very different kinds of
search used in AI: state space search and local search. ==== State space search ==== State space
search searches through a tree of possible states to try to find a goal state. For example, planning
algorithms search through trees of goals and subgoals, attempting to find a path to a target goal, a
process called means-ends analysis. Simple exhaustive searches are rarely sufficient for most real-
world problems: the search space (the number of places to search) quickly grows to astronomical
numbers. The result is a search that is too slow or never completes. "Heuristics" or "rules of
thumb" can help prioritize choices that are more likely to reach a goal. Adversarial search is used
for game-playing programs, such as chess or Go. It searches through a tree of possible moves and
countermoves, looking for a winning position. ==== Local search ==== Local search uses
mathematical optimization to find a solution to a problem. It begins with some form of guess and
refines it incrementally. Gradient descent is a type of local search that optimizes a set of
numerical parameters by incrementally adjusting them to minimize a loss function. Variants of
gradient descent are commonly used to train neural networks, through the backpropagation algorithm.
Another type of local search is evolutionary computation, which aims to iteratively improve a set of
candidate solutions by "mutating" and "recombining" them, selecting only the fittest to survive each
generation. Distributed search processes can coordinate via swarm intelligence algorithms. Two
popular swarm algorithms used in search are particle swarm optimization (inspired by bird flocking)
and ant colony optimization (inspired by ant trails). === Logic === Formal logic is used for
reasoning and knowledge representation. Formal logic comes in two main forms: propositional logic
(which operates on statements that are true or false and uses logical connectives such as "and",
"or", "not" and "implies") and predicate logic (which also operates on objects, predicates and
relations and uses quantifiers such as "Every X is a Y" and "There are some Xs that are Ys").
Deductive reasoning in logic is the process of proving a new statement (conclusion) from other
statements that are given and assumed to be true (the premises). Proofs can be structured as proof
trees, in which nodes are labelled by sentences, and children nodes are connected to parent nodes by
inference rules. Given a problem and a set of premises, problem-solving reduces to searching for a
proof tree whose root node is labelled by a solution of the problem and whose leaf nodes are
labelled by premises or axioms. In the case of Horn clauses, problem-solving search can be performed
by reasoning forwards from the premises or backwards from the problem. In the more general case of
the clausal form of first-order logic, resolution is a single, axiom-free rule of inference, in
which a problem is solved by proving a contradiction from premises that include the negation of the
problem to be solved. Inference in both Horn clause logic and first-order logic is undecidable, and
therefore intractable. However, backward reasoning with Horn clauses, which underpins computation in
the logic programming language Prolog, is Turing complete. Moreover, its efficiency is competitive
with computation in other symbolic programming languages. Fuzzy logic assigns a "degree of truth"
between 0 and 1. It can therefore handle propositions that are vague and partially true. Non-
monotonic logics, including logic programming with negation as failure, are designed to handle
default reasoning. Other specialized versions of logic have been developed to describe many complex
domains. === Probabilistic methods for uncertain reasoning === Many problems in AI (including
reasoning, planning, learning, perception, and robotics) require the agent to operate with
incomplete or uncertain information. AI researchers have devised a number of tools to solve these
problems using methods from probability theory and economics. Precise mathematical tools have been
developed that analyze how an agent can make choices and plan, using decision theory, decision
analysis, and information value theory. These tools include models such as Markov decision
processes, dynamic decision networks, game theory and mechanism design. Bayesian networks are a
that can be used for reasoning (using the Bayesian inference algorithm), learning (using the
expectation–maximization algorithm), planning (using decision networks) and perception (using
dynamic Bayesian networks). Probabilistic algorithms can also be used for filtering, prediction,
smoothing, and finding explanations for streams of data, thus helping perception systems analyze
processes that occur over time (e.g., hidden Markov models or Kalman filters). === Classifiers and
statistical learning methods === The simplest AI applications can be divided into two types:
classifiers (e.g., "if shiny then diamond"), on one hand, and controllers (e.g., "if diamond then
pick up"), on the other hand. Classifiers are functions that use pattern matching to determine the
closest match. They can be fine-tuned based on chosen examples using supervised learning. Each
pattern (also called an "observation") is labeled with a certain predefined class. All the
observations combined with their class labels are known as a data set. When a new observation is
received, that observation is classified based on previous experience. There are many kinds of
classifiers in use. The decision tree is the simplest and most widely used symbolic machine learning
algorithm. K-nearest neighbor algorithm was the most widely used analogical AI until the mid-1990s,
and Kernel methods such as the support vector machine (SVM) displaced k-nearest neighbor in the
1990s. The naive Bayes classifier is reportedly the "most widely used learner" at Google, due in
part to its scalability. Neural networks are also used as classifiers. === Artificial neural
networks === An artificial neural network is based on a collection of nodes also known as
artificial neurons, which loosely model the neurons in a biological brain. It is trained to
recognise patterns; once trained, it can recognise those patterns in fresh data. There is an input,
at least one hidden layer of nodes and an output. Each node applies a function and once the weight
crosses its specified threshold, the data is transmitted to the next layer. A network is typically
called a deep neural network if it has at least 2 hidden layers. Learning algorithms for neural
networks use local search to choose the weights that will get the right output for each input during
training. The most common training technique is the backpropagation algorithm. Neural networks learn
to model complex relationships between inputs and outputs and find patterns in data. In theory, a
neural network can learn any function. In feedforward neural networks the signal passes in only one
direction. The term perceptron typically refers to a single-layer neural network. In contrast, deep
learning uses many layers. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) feed the output signal back into the
input, which allows short-term memories of previous input events. Long short-term memory networks
(LSTMs) are recurrent neural networks that better preserve longterm dependencies and are less
sensitive to the vanishing gradient problem. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) use layers of
kernels to more efficiently process local patterns. This local processing is especially important in
image processing, where the early CNN layers typically identify simple local patterns such as edges
and curves, with subsequent layers detecting more complex patterns like textures, and eventually
whole objects. === Deep learning === Deep learning uses several layers of neurons between the
network's inputs and outputs. The multiple layers can progressively extract higher-level features
from the raw input. For example, in image processing, lower layers may identify edges, while higher
layers may identify the concepts relevant to a human such as digits, letters, or faces. Deep
learning has profoundly improved the performance of programs in many important subfields of
artificial intelligence, including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing,
image classification, and others. The reason that deep learning performs so well in so many
applications is not known as of 2021. The sudden success of deep learning in 2012–2015 did not occur
because of some new discovery or theoretical breakthrough (deep neural networks and backpropagatio
had been described by many people, as far back as the 1950s) but because of two factors: the
incredible increase in computer power (including the hundred-fold increase in speed by switching to
GPUs) and the availability of vast amounts of training data, especially the giant curated datasets
used for benchmark testing, such as ImageNet. === GPT === Generative pre-trained transformers
(GPT) are large language models (LLMs) that generate text based on the semantic relationships
between words in sentences. Text-based GPT models are pre-trained on a large corpus of text that can
be from the Internet. The pretraining consists of predicting the next token (a token being usually a
word, subword, or punctuation). Throughout this pretraining, GPT models accumulate knowledge about
the world and can then generate human-like text by repeatedly predicting the next token. Typically,
a subsequent training phase makes the model more truthful, useful, and harmless, usually with a
technique called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Current GPT models are prone
generating falsehoods called "hallucinations". These can be reduced with RLHF and quality data, but
the problem has been getting worse for reasoning systems. Such systems are used in chatbots, which
allow people to ask a question or request a task in simple text. Current models and services include
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and Meta AI. Multimodal GPT models can process different types o
data (modalities) such as images, videos, sound, and text. === Hardware and software === In the
late 2010s, graphics processing units (GPUs) that were increasingly designed with AI-specific
enhancements and used with specialized TensorFlow software had replaced previously used central
processing unit (CPUs) as the dominant means for large-scale (commercial and academic) machine
learning models' training. Specialized programming languages such as Prolog were used in early AI
research, but general-purpose programming languages like Python have become predominant. The
transistor density in integrated circuits has been observed to roughly double every 18 months—a
trend known as Moore's law, named after the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who first identified it.
Improvements in GPUs have been even faster, a trend sometimes called Huang's law, named after Nvi
co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang. == Applications == AI and machine learning technology is used in
most of the essential applications of the 2020s, including: search engines (such as Google Search),
targeting online advertisements, recommendation systems (offered by Netflix, YouTube or Amazon),
driving internet traffic, targeted advertising (AdSense, Facebook), virtual assistants (such as Siri
or Alexa), autonomous vehicles (including drones, ADAS and self-driving cars), automatic language
translation (Microsoft Translator, Google Translate), facial recognition (Apple's FaceID or
Microsoft's DeepFace and Google's FaceNet) and image labeling (used by Facebook, Apple's Photos a
TikTok). The deployment of AI may be overseen by a chief automation officer (CAO). === Health and
medicine === The application of AI in medicine and medical research has the potential to increase
patient care and quality of life. Through the lens of the Hippocratic Oath, medical professionals
are ethically compelled to use AI, if applications can more accurately diagnose and treat patients.
For medical research, AI is an important tool for processing and integrating big data. This is
particularly important for organoid and tissue engineering development which use microscopy imaging
as a key technique in fabrication. It has been suggested that AI can overcome discrepancies in
funding allocated to different fields of research. New AI tools can deepen the understanding of
biomedically relevant pathways. For example, AlphaFold 2 (2021) demonstrated the ability to
approximate, in hours rather than months, the 3D structure of a protein. In 2023, it was reported
that AI-guided drug discovery helped find a class of antibiotics capable of killing two different
types of drug-resistant bacteria. In 2024, researchers used machine learning to accelerate the
search for Parkinson's disease drug treatments. Their aim was to identify compounds that block the
clumping, or aggregation, of alpha-synuclein (the protein that characterises Parkinson's disease).
They were able to speed up the initial screening process ten-fold and reduce the cost by a thousand-
fold. === Games === Game playing programs have been used since the 1950s to demonstrate and te
AI's most advanced techniques. Deep Blue became the first computer chess-playing system to beat a
reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, on 11 May 1997. In 2011, in a Jeopardy! quiz show
exhibition match, IBM's question answering system, Watson, defeated the two greatest Jeopardy!
champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, by a significant margin. In March 2016, AlphaGo won 4 out
of 5 games of Go in a match with Go champion Lee Sedol, becoming the first computer Go-playing
system to beat a professional Go player without handicaps. Then, in 2017, it defeated Ke Jie, who
was the best Go player in the world. Other programs handle imperfect-information games, such as the
poker-playing program Pluribus. DeepMind developed increasingly generalistic reinforcement learning
models, such as with MuZero, which could be trained to play chess, Go, or Atari games. In 2019,
DeepMind's AlphaStar achieved grandmaster level in StarCraft II, a particularly challenging real-
time strategy game that involves incomplete knowledge of what happens on the map. In 2021, an AI
agent competed in a PlayStation Gran Turismo competition, winning against four of the world's best
Gran Turismo drivers using deep reinforcement learning. In 2024, Google DeepMind introduced SIMA,
type of AI capable of autonomously playing nine previously unseen open-world video games by
observing screen output, as well as executing short, specific tasks in response to natural language
instructions. === Mathematics === Large language models, such as GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, Llama or
Mistral, are increasingly used in mathematics. These probabilistic models are versatile, but can
also produce wrong answers in the form of hallucinations. They sometimes need a large database of
mathematical problems to learn from, but also methods such as supervised fine-tuning or trained
classifiers with human-annotated data to improve answers for new problems and learn from
corrections. A February 2024 study showed that the performance of some language models for reasoni
capabilities in solving math problems not included in their training data was low, even for problems
with only minor deviations from trained data. One technique to improve their performance involves
training the models to produce correct reasoning steps, rather than just the correct result. The
Alibaba Group developed a version of its Qwen models called Qwen2-Math, that achieved state-of-the-
art performance on several mathematical benchmarks, including 84% accuracy on the MATH dataset o
competition mathematics problems. In January 2025, Microsoft proposed the technique rStar-Math that
leverages Monte Carlo tree search and step-by-step reasoning, enabling a relatively small language
model like Qwen-7B to solve 53% of the AIME 2024 and 90% of the MATH benchmark problems.
Alternatively, dedicated models for mathematical problem solving with higher precision for the
outcome including proof of theorems have been developed such as AlphaTensor, AlphaGeometry,
AlphaProof and AlphaEvolve all from Google DeepMind, Llemma from EleutherAI or Julius. When natur
language is used to describe mathematical problems, converters can transform such prompts into a
formal language such as Lean to define mathematical tasks. Some models have been developed to sol
challenging problems and reach good results in benchmark tests, others to serve as educational tools
in mathematics. Topological deep learning integrates various topological approaches. === Finance
=== Finance is one of the fastest growing sectors where applied AI tools are being deployed: from
retail online banking to investment advice and insurance, where automated "robot advisers" have been
in use for some years. According to Nicolas Firzli, director of the World Pensions & Investments
Forum, it may be too early to see the emergence of highly innovative AI-informed financial products
and services. He argues that "the deployment of AI tools will simply further automatise things:
destroying tens of thousands of jobs in banking, financial planning, and pension advice in the
process, but I'm not sure it will unleash a new wave of [e.g., sophisticated] pension innovation."
=== Military === Various countries are deploying AI military applications. The main applications
enhance command and control, communications, sensors, integration and interoperability. Research is
targeting intelligence collection and analysis, logistics, cyber operations, information operations,
and semiautonomous and autonomous vehicles. AI technologies enable coordination of sensors and
effectors, threat detection and identification, marking of enemy positions, target acquisition,
coordination and deconfliction of distributed Joint Fires between networked combat vehicles, both
human-operated and autonomous. AI has been used in military operations in Iraq, Syria, Israel and
Ukraine. === Generative AI === === Agents === AI agents are software entities designed to
perceive their environment, make decisions, and take actions autonomously to achieve specific goals.
These agents can interact with users, their environment, or other agents. AI agents are used in
various applications, including virtual assistants, chatbots, autonomous vehicles, game-playing
systems, and industrial robotics. AI agents operate within the constraints of their programming,
available computational resources, and hardware limitations. This means they are restricted to
performing tasks within their defined scope and have finite memory and processing capabilities. In
real-world applications, AI agents often face time constraints for decision-making and action
execution. Many AI agents incorporate learning algorithms, enabling them to improve their
performance over time through experience or training. Using machine learning, AI agents can adapt to
new situations and optimise their behaviour for their designated tasks. === Sexuality ===
Applications of AI in this domain include AI-enabled menstruation and fertility trackers that
analyze user data to offer predictions, AI-integrated sex toys (e.g., teledildonics), AI-generated
sexual education content, and AI agents that simulate sexual and romantic partners (e.g., Replika).
AI is also used for the production of non-consensual deepfake pornography, raising significant
ethical and legal concerns. AI technologies have also been used to attempt to identify online
gender-based violence and online sexual grooming of minors. === Other industry-specific tasks ===
There are also thousands of successful AI applications used to solve specific problems for specific
industries or institutions. In a 2017 survey, one in five companies reported having incorporated
"AI" in some offerings or processes. A few examples are energy storage, medical diagnosis, military
logistics, applications that predict the result of judicial decisions, foreign policy, or supply
chain management. AI applications for evacuation and disaster management are growing. AI has been
used to investigate patterns in large-scale and small-scale evacuations using historical data from
GPS, videos or social media. Furthermore, AI can provide real-time information on the evacuation
conditions. In agriculture, AI has helped farmers to increase yield and identify areas that need
irrigation, fertilization, pesticide treatments. Agronomists use AI to conduct research and
development. AI has been used to predict the ripening time for crops such as tomatoes, monitor soil
moisture, operate agricultural robots, conduct predictive analytics, classify livestock pig call
emotions, automate greenhouses, detect diseases and pests, and save water. Artificial intelligence
is used in astronomy to analyze increasing amounts of available data and applications, mainly for
"classification, regression, clustering, forecasting, generation, discovery, and the development of
new scientific insights." For example, it is used for discovering exoplanets, forecasting solar
activity, and distinguishing between signals and instrumental effects in gravitational wave
astronomy. Additionally, it could be used for activities in space, such as space exploration,
including the analysis of data from space missions, real-time science decisions of spacecraft, space
debris avoidance, and more autonomous operation. During the 2024 Indian elections, US$50 million wa
spent on authorized AI-generated content, notably by creating deepfakes of allied (including
sometimes deceased) politicians to better engage with voters, and by translating speeches to various
local languages. == Ethics == AI has potential benefits and potential risks. AI may be able to
advance science and find solutions for serious problems: Demis Hassabis of DeepMind hopes to "solve
intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else". However, as the use of AI has become
widespread, several unintended consequences and risks have been identified. In-production systems
can sometimes not factor ethics and bias into their AI training processes, especially when the AI
algorithms are inherently unexplainable in deep learning. === Risks and harm === ==== Privacy
and copyright ==== Machine learning algorithms require large amounts of data. The techniques used
to acquire this data have raised concerns about privacy, surveillance and copyright. AI-powered
devices and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT products, continuously collect personal
information, raising concerns about intrusive data gathering and unauthorized access by third
parties. The loss of privacy is further exacerbated by AI's ability to process and combine vast
amounts of data, potentially leading to a surveillance society where individual activities are
constantly monitored and analyzed without adequate safeguards or transparency. Sensitive user data
collected may include online activity records, geolocation data, video, or audio. For example, in
order to build speech recognition algorithms, Amazon has recorded millions of private conversations
and allowed temporary workers to listen to and transcribe some of them. Opinions about this
widespread surveillance range from those who see it as a necessary evil to those for whom it is
clearly unethical and a violation of the right to privacy. AI developers argue that this is the only
way to deliver valuable applications and have developed several techniques that attempt to preserve
privacy while still obtaining the data, such as data aggregation, de-identification and differential
privacy. Since 2016, some privacy experts, such as Cynthia Dwork, have begun to view privacy in
terms of fairness. Brian Christian wrote that experts have pivoted "from the question of 'what they
know' to the question of 'what they're doing with it'." Generative AI is often trained on unlicensed
copyrighted works, including in domains such as images or computer code; the output is then used
under the rationale of "fair use". Experts disagree about how well and under what circumstances this
rationale will hold up in courts of law; relevant factors may include "the purpose and character of
the use of the copyrighted work" and "the effect upon the potential market for the copyrighted
work". Website owners who do not wish to have their content scraped can indicate it in a
"[Link]" file. In 2023, leading authors (including John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen) sued AI
companies for using their work to train generative AI. Another discussed approach is to envision a
separate sui generis system of protection for creations generated by AI to ensure fair attribution
and compensation for human authors. ==== Dominance by tech giants ==== The commercial AI scene
dominated by Big Tech companies such as Alphabet Inc., Amazon, Apple Inc., Meta Platforms, and
Microsoft. Some of these players already own the vast majority of existing cloud infrastructure and
computing power from data centers, allowing them to entrench further in the marketplace. ====
Power needs and environmental impacts ==== In January 2024, the International Energy Agency (IEA)
released Electricity 2024, Analysis and Forecast to 2026, forecasting electric power use. This is
the first IEA report to make projections for data centers and power consumption for artificial
intelligence and cryptocurrency. The report states that power demand for these uses might double by
2026, with additional electric power usage equal to electricity used by the whole Japanese nation.
Prodigious power consumption by AI is responsible for the growth of fossil fuel use, and might delay
closings of obsolete, carbon-emitting coal energy facilities. There is a feverish rise in the
construction of data centers throughout the US, making large technology firms (e.g., Microsoft,
Meta, Google, Amazon) into voracious consumers of electric power. Projected electric consumption is
so immense that there is concern that it will be fulfilled no matter the source. A ChatGPT search
involves the use of 10 times the electrical energy as a Google search. The large firms are in haste
to find power sources – from nuclear energy to geothermal to fusion. The tech firms argue that – in
the long view – AI will be eventually kinder to the environment, but they need the energy now. AI
makes the power grid more efficient and "intelligent", will assist in the growth of nuclear power,
and track overall carbon emissions, according to technology firms. A 2024 Goldman Sachs Research
Paper, AI Data Centers and the Coming US Power Demand Surge, found "US power demand (is) likely
experience growth not seen in a generation...." and forecasts that, by 2030, US data centers will
consume 8% of US power, as opposed to 3% in 2022, presaging growth for the electrical power
generation industry by a variety of means. Data centers' need for more and more electrical power is
such that they might max out the electrical grid. The Big Tech companies counter that AI can be used
to maximize the utilization of the grid by all. In 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported that big
AI companies have begun negotiations with the US nuclear power providers to provide electricity to
the data centers. In March 2024 Amazon purchased a Pennsylvania nuclear-powered data center for
US$650 million. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said nuclear power is a good option for the data centers. In
September 2024, Microsoft announced an agreement with Constellation Energy to re-open the Three M
Island nuclear power plant to provide Microsoft with 100% of all electric power produced by the
plant for 20 years. Reopening the plant, which suffered a partial nuclear meltdown of its Unit 2
reactor in 1979, will require Constellation to get through strict regulatory processes which will
include extensive safety scrutiny from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If approved (this will
be the first ever US re-commissioning of a nuclear plant), over 835 megawatts of power – enough for
800,000 homes – of energy will be produced. The cost for re-opening and upgrading is estimated at
US$1.6 billion and is dependent on tax breaks for nuclear power contained in the 2022 US Inflation
Reduction Act. The US government and the state of Michigan are investing almost US$2 billion to
reopen the Palisades Nuclear reactor on Lake Michigan. Closed since 2022, the plant is planned to be
reopened in October 2025. The Three Mile Island facility will be renamed the Crane Clean Energy
Center after Chris Crane, a nuclear proponent and former CEO of Exelon who was responsible for
Exelon's spinoff of Constellation. After the last approval in September 2023, Taiwan suspended the
approval of data centers north of Taoyuan with a capacity of more than 5 MW in 2024, due to power
supply shortages. Taiwan aims to phase out nuclear power by 2025. On the other hand, Singapore
imposed a ban on the opening of data centers in 2019 due to electric power, but in 2022, lifted this
ban. Although most nuclear plants in Japan have been shut down after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear
accident, according to an October 2024 Bloomberg article in Japanese, cloud gaming services compan
Ubitus, in which Nvidia has a stake, is looking for land in Japan near nuclear power plant for a new
data center for generative AI. Ubitus CEO Wesley Kuo said nuclear power plants are the most
efficient, cheap and stable power for AI. On 1 November 2024, the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission (FERC) rejected an application submitted by Talen Energy for approval to supply some
electricity from the nuclear power station Susquehanna to Amazon's data center. According to the
Commission Chairman Willie L. Phillips, it is a burden on the electricity grid as well as a
significant cost shifting concern to households and other business sectors. In 2025, a report
prepared by the International Energy Agency estimated the greenhouse gas emissions from the energy
consumption of AI at 180 million tons. By 2035, these emissions could rise to 300–500 million tonnes
depending on what measures will be taken. This is below 1.5% of the energy sector emissions. The
emissions reduction potential of AI was estimated at 5% of the energy sector emissions, but rebound
effects (for example if people switch from public transport to autonomous cars) can reduce it.
==== Misinformation ==== YouTube, Facebook and others use recommender systems to guide users t
more content. These AI programs were given the goal of maximizing user engagement (that is, the only
goal was to keep people watching). The AI learned that users tended to choose misinformation,
conspiracy theories, and extreme partisan content, and, to keep them watching, the AI recommended
more of it. Users also tended to watch more content on the same subject, so the AI led people into
filter bubbles where they received multiple versions of the same misinformation. This convinced many
users that the misinformation was true, and ultimately undermined trust in institutions, the media
and the government. The AI program had correctly learned to maximize its goal, but the result was
harmful to society. After the U.S. election in 2016, major technology companies took some steps to
mitigate the problem. In the early 2020s, generative AI began to create images, audio, and texts
that are virtually indistinguishable from real photographs, recordings, or human writing, while
realistic AI-generated videos became feasible in the mid-2020s. It is possible for bad actors to use
this technology to create massive amounts of misinformation or propaganda; one such potential
malicious use is deepfakes for computational propaganda. AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton expressed
concern about AI enabling "authoritarian leaders to manipulate their electorates" on a large scale,
among other risks. AI researchers at Microsoft, OpenAI, universities and other organisations have
suggested using "personhood credentials" as a way to overcome online deception enabled by AI model
==== Algorithmic bias and fairness ==== Machine learning applications will be biased if they learn
from biased data. The developers may not be aware that the bias exists. Bias can be introduced by
the way training data is selected and by the way a model is deployed. If a biased algorithm is used
to make decisions that can seriously harm people (as it can in medicine, finance, recruitment,
housing or policing) then the algorithm may cause discrimination. The field of fairness studies how
to prevent harms from algorithmic biases. On June 28, 2015, Google Photos's new image labeling
feature mistakenly identified Jacky Alcine and a friend as "gorillas" because they were black. The
system was trained on a dataset that contained very few images of black people, a problem called
"sample size disparity". Google "fixed" this problem by preventing the system from labelling
anything as a "gorilla". Eight years later, in 2023, Google Photos still could not identify a
gorilla, and neither could similar products from Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. COMPAS is a
commercial program widely used by U.S. courts to assess the likelihood of a defendant becoming a
recidivist. In 2016, Julia Angwin at ProPublica discovered that COMPAS exhibited racial bias,
despite the fact that the program was not told the races of the defendants. Although the error rate
for both whites and blacks was calibrated equal at exactly 61%, the errors for each race were
different—the system consistently overestimated the chance that a black person would re-offend and
would underestimate the chance that a white person would not re-offend. In 2017, several researchers
showed that it was mathematically impossible for COMPAS to accommodate all possible measures of
fairness when the base rates of re-offense were different for whites and blacks in the data. A
program can make biased decisions even if the data does not explicitly mention a problematic feature
(such as "race" or "gender"). The feature will correlate with other features (like "address",
"shopping history" or "first name"), and the program will make the same decisions based on these
features as it would on "race" or "gender". Moritz Hardt said "the most robust fact in this research
area is that fairness through blindness doesn't work." Criticism of COMPAS highlighted that machine
learning models are designed to make "predictions" that are only valid if we assume that the future
will resemble the past. If they are trained on data that includes the results of racist decisions in
the past, machine learning models must predict that racist decisions will be made in the future. If
an application then uses these predictions as recommendations, some of these "recommendations" will
likely be racist. Thus, machine learning is not well suited to help make decisions in areas where
there is hope that the future will be better than the past. It is descriptive rather than
prescriptive. Bias and unfairness may go undetected because the developers are overwhelmingly white
and male: among AI engineers, about 4% are black and 20% are women. There are various conflicting
definitions and mathematical models of fairness. These notions depend on ethical assumptions, and
are influenced by beliefs about society. One broad category is distributive fairness, which focuses
on the outcomes, often identifying groups and seeking to compensate for statistical disparities.
Representational fairness tries to ensure that AI systems do not reinforce negative stereotypes or
render certain groups invisible. Procedural fairness focuses on the decision process rather than the
outcome. The most relevant notions of fairness may depend on the context, notably the type of AI
application and the stakeholders. The subjectivity in the notions of bias and fairness makes it
difficult for companies to operationalize them. Having access to sensitive attributes such as race
or gender is also considered by many AI ethicists to be necessary in order to compensate for biases,
but it may conflict with anti-discrimination laws. At its 2022 Conference on Fairness,
Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT 2022), the Association for Computing Machinery, in
Seoul, South Korea, presented and published findings that recommend that until AI and robotics
systems are demonstrated to be free of bias mistakes, they are unsafe, and the use of self-learning
neural networks trained on vast, unregulated sources of flawed internet data should be curtailed.
==== Lack of transparency ==== Many AI systems are so complex that their designers cannot explain
how they reach their decisions. Particularly with deep neural networks, in which there are many non-
linear relationships between inputs and outputs. But some popular explainability techniques exist.
It is impossible to be certain that a program is operating correctly if no one knows how exactly it
works. There have been many cases where a machine learning program passed rigorous tests, but
nevertheless learned something different than what the programmers intended. For example, a system
that could identify skin diseases better than medical professionals was found to actually have a
strong tendency to classify images with a ruler as "cancerous", because pictures of malignancies
typically include a ruler to show the scale. Another machine learning system designed to help
effectively allocate medical resources was found to classify patients with asthma as being at "low
risk" of dying from pneumonia. Having asthma is actually a severe risk factor, but since the
patients having asthma would usually get much more medical care, they were relatively unlikely to
die according to the training data. The correlation between asthma and low risk of dying from
pneumonia was real, but misleading. People who have been harmed by an algorithm's decision have a
right to an explanation. Doctors, for example, are expected to clearly and completely explain to
their colleagues the reasoning behind any decision they make. Early drafts of the European Union's
General Data Protection Regulation in 2016 included an explicit statement that this right exists.
Industry experts noted that this is an unsolved problem with no solution in sight. Regulators argued
that nevertheless the harm is real: if the problem has no solution, the tools should not be used.
DARPA established the XAI ("Explainable Artificial Intelligence") program in 2014 to try to solve
these problems. Several approaches aim to address the transparency problem. SHAP enables to
visualise the contribution of each feature to the output. LIME can locally approximate a model's
outputs with a simpler, interpretable model. Multitask learning provides a large number of outputs
in addition to the target classification. These other outputs can help developers deduce what the
network has learned. Deconvolution, DeepDream and other generative methods can allow developers t
see what different layers of a deep network for computer vision have learned, and produce output
that can suggest what the network is learning. For generative pre-trained transformers, Anthropic
developed a technique based on dictionary learning that associates patterns of neuron activations
with human-understandable concepts. ==== Bad actors and weaponized AI ==== Artificial
intelligence provides a number of tools that are useful to bad actors, such as authoritarian
governments, terrorists, criminals or rogue states. A lethal autonomous weapon is a machine that
locates, selects and engages human targets without human supervision. Widely available AI tools can
be used by bad actors to develop inexpensive autonomous weapons and, if produced at scale, they are
potentially weapons of mass destruction. Even when used in conventional warfare, they currently
cannot reliably choose targets and could potentially kill an innocent person. In 2014, 30 nations
(including China) supported a ban on autonomous weapons under the United Nations' Convention on
Certain Conventional Weapons, however the United States and others disagreed. By 2015, over fifty
countries were reported to be researching battlefield robots. AI tools make it easier for
authoritarian governments to efficiently control their citizens in several ways. Face and voice
recognition allow widespread surveillance. Machine learning, operating this data, can classify
potential enemies of the state and prevent them from hiding. Recommendation systems can precisely
target propaganda and misinformation for maximum effect. Deepfakes and generative AI aid in
producing misinformation. Advanced AI can make authoritarian centralized decision-making more
competitive than liberal and decentralized systems such as markets. It lowers the cost and
difficulty of digital warfare and advanced spyware. All these technologies have been available since
2020 or earlier—AI facial recognition systems are already being used for mass surveillance in China.
There are many other ways in which AI is expected to help bad actors, some of which can not be
foreseen. For example, machine-learning AI is able to design tens of thousands of toxic molecules in
a matter of hours. ==== Technological unemployment ==== Economists have frequently highlighted
the risks of redundancies from AI, and speculated about unemployment if there is no adequate social
policy for full employment. In the past, technology has tended to increase rather than reduce total
employment, but economists acknowledge that "we're in uncharted territory" with AI. A survey of
economists showed disagreement about whether the increasing use of robots and AI will cause a
substantial increase in long-term unemployment, but they generally agree that it could be a net
benefit if productivity gains are redistributed. Risk estimates vary; for example, in the 2010s,
Michael Osborne and Carl Benedikt Frey estimated 47% of U.S. jobs are at "high risk" of potential
automation, while an OECD report classified only 9% of U.S. jobs as "high risk". The methodology of
speculating about future employment levels has been criticised as lacking evidential foundation, and
for implying that technology, rather than social policy, creates unemployment, as opposed to
redundancies. In April 2023, it was reported that 70% of the jobs for Chinese video game
illustrators had been eliminated by generative artificial intelligence. Unlike previous waves of
automation, many middle-class jobs may be eliminated by artificial intelligence; The Economist
stated in 2015 that "the worry that AI could do to white-collar jobs what steam power did to blue-
collar ones during the Industrial Revolution" is "worth taking seriously". Jobs at extreme risk
range from paralegals to fast food cooks, while job demand is likely to increase for care-related
professions ranging from personal healthcare to the clergy. From the early days of the development
of artificial intelligence, there have been arguments, for example, those put forward by Joseph
Weizenbaum, about whether tasks that can be done by computers actually should be done by them, giv
the difference between computers and humans, and between quantitative calculation and qualitative,
value-based judgement. ==== Existential risk ==== It has been argued AI will become so powerful
that humanity may irreversibly lose control of it. This could, as physicist Stephen Hawking stated,
"spell the end of the human race". This scenario has been common in science fiction, when a computer
or robot suddenly develops a human-like "self-awareness" (or "sentience" or "consciousness") and
becomes a malevolent character. These sci-fi scenarios are misleading in several ways. First, AI
does not require human-like sentience to be an existential risk. Modern AI programs are given
specific goals and use learning and intelligence to achieve them. Philosopher Nick Bostrom argued
that if one gives almost any goal to a sufficiently powerful AI, it may choose to destroy humanity
to achieve it (he used the example of a paperclip maximizer). Stuart Russell gives the example of
household robot that tries to find a way to kill its owner to prevent it from being unplugged,
reasoning that "you can't fetch the coffee if you're dead." In order to be safe for humanity, a
superintelligence would have to be genuinely aligned with humanity's morality and values so that it
is "fundamentally on our side". Second, Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI does not require a robot
body or physical control to pose an existential risk. The essential parts of civilization are not
physical. Things like ideologies, law, government, money and the economy are built on language; they
exist because there are stories that billions of people believe. The current prevalence of
misinformation suggests that an AI could use language to convince people to believe anything, even
to take actions that are destructive. The opinions amongst experts and industry insiders are mixed,
with sizable fractions both concerned and unconcerned by risk from eventual superintelligent AI.
Personalities such as Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, as well as AI pioneers such as
Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Demis Hassabis, and Sam Altman, have expressed concerns about
existential risk from AI. In May 2023, Geoffrey Hinton announced his resignation from Google in
order to be able to "freely speak out about the risks of AI" without "considering how this impacts
Google". He notably mentioned risks of an AI takeover, and stressed that in order to avoid the worst
outcomes, establishing safety guidelines will require cooperation among those competing in use of
AI. In 2023, many leading AI experts endorsed the joint statement that "Mitigating the risk of
extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as
pandemics and nuclear war". Some other researchers were more optimistic. AI pioneer Jürgen
Schmidhuber did not sign the joint statement, emphasising that in 95% of all cases, AI research is
about making "human lives longer and healthier and easier." While the tools that are now being used
to improve lives can also be used by bad actors, "they can also be used against the bad actors."
Andrew Ng also argued that "it's a mistake to fall for the doomsday hype on AI—and that regulators
who do will only benefit vested interests." Yann LeCun "scoffs at his peers' dystopian scenarios of
supercharged misinformation and even, eventually, human extinction." In the early 2010s, experts
argued that the risks are too distant in the future to warrant research or that humans will be
valuable from the perspective of a superintelligent machine. However, after 2016, the study of
current and future risks and possible solutions became a serious area of research. === Ethical
machines and alignment === Friendly AI are machines that have been designed from the beginning to
minimize risks and to make choices that benefit humans. Eliezer Yudkowsky, who coined the term,
argues that developing friendly AI should be a higher research priority: it may require a large
investment and it must be completed before AI becomes an existential risk. Machines with
intelligence have the potential to use their intelligence to make ethical decisions. The field of
machine ethics provides machines with ethical principles and procedures for resolving ethical
dilemmas. The field of machine ethics is also called computational morality, and was founded at an
AAAI symposium in 2005. Other approaches include Wendell Wallach's "artificial moral agents" and
Stuart J. Russell's three principles for developing provably beneficial machines. === Open source
=== Active organizations in the AI open-source community include Hugging Face, Google, EleutherAI
and Meta. Various AI models, such as Llama 2, Mistral or Stable Diffusion, have been made open-
weight, meaning that their architecture and trained parameters (the "weights") are publicly
available. Open-weight models can be freely fine-tuned, which allows companies to specialize them
with their own data and for their own use-case. Open-weight models are useful for research and
innovation but can also be misused. Since they can be fine-tuned, any built-in security measure,
such as objecting to harmful requests, can be trained away until it becomes ineffective. Some
researchers warn that future AI models may develop dangerous capabilities (such as the potential to
drastically facilitate bioterrorism) and that once released on the Internet, they cannot be deleted
everywhere if needed. They recommend pre-release audits and cost-benefit analyses. === Framework
=== Artificial intelligence projects can be guided by ethical considerations during the design,
development, and implementation of an AI system. An AI framework such as the Care and Act Framew
developed by the Alan Turing Institute and based on the SUM values, outlines four main ethical
dimensions, defined as follows: Respect the dignity of individual people Connect with other people
sincerely, openly, and inclusively Care for the wellbeing of everyone Protect social values,
justice, and the public interest Other developments in ethical frameworks include those decided upon
during the Asilomar Conference, the Montreal Declaration for Responsible AI, and the IEEE's Ethics
of Autonomous Systems initiative, among others; however, these principles are not without criticism,
especially regarding the people chosen to contribute to these frameworks. Promotion of the wellbeing
of the people and communities that these technologies affect requires consideration of the social
and ethical implications at all stages of AI system design, development and implementation, and
collaboration between job roles such as data scientists, product managers, data engineers, domain
experts, and delivery managers. The UK AI Safety Institute released in 2024 a testing toolset called
'Inspect' for AI safety evaluations available under an MIT open-source licence which is freely
available on GitHub and can be improved with third-party packages. It can be used to evaluate AI
models in a range of areas including core knowledge, ability to reason, and autonomous capabilities.
=== Regulation === The regulation of artificial intelligence is the development of public sector
policies and laws for promoting and regulating AI; it is therefore related to the broader regulation
of algorithms. The regulatory and policy landscape for AI is an emerging issue in jurisdictions
globally. According to AI Index at Stanford, the annual number of AI-related laws passed in the 127
survey countries jumped from one passed in 2016 to 37 passed in 2022 alone. Between 2016 and 2020
more than 30 countries adopted dedicated strategies for AI. Most EU member states had released
national AI strategies, as had Canada, China, India, Japan, Mauritius, the Russian Federation, Saudi
Arabia, United Arab Emirates, U.S., and Vietnam. Others were in the process of elaborating their own
AI strategy, including Bangladesh, Malaysia and Tunisia. The Global Partnership on Artificial
Intelligence was launched in June 2020, stating a need for AI to be developed in accordance with
human rights and democratic values, to ensure public confidence and trust in the technology. Henry
Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher published a joint statement in November 2021
calling for a government commission to regulate AI. In 2023, OpenAI leaders published
recommendations for the governance of superintelligence, which they believe may happen in less than
10 years. In 2023, the United Nations also launched an advisory body to provide recommendations on
AI governance; the body comprises technology company executives, government officials and academi
In 2024, the Council of Europe created the first international legally binding treaty on AI, called
the "Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of
Law". It was adopted by the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other
signatories. In a 2022 Ipsos survey, attitudes towards AI varied greatly by country; 78% of Chinese
citizens, but only 35% of Americans, agreed that "products and services using AI have more benefits
than drawbacks". A 2023 Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 61% of Americans agree, and 22% disagree, tha
AI poses risks to humanity. In a 2023 Fox News poll, 35% of Americans thought it "very important",
and an additional 41% thought it "somewhat important", for the federal government to regulate AI,
versus 13% responding "not very important" and 8% responding "not at all important". In November
2023, the first global AI Safety Summit was held in Bletchley Park in the UK to discuss the near and
far term risks of AI and the possibility of mandatory and voluntary regulatory frameworks. 28
countries including the United States, China, and the European Union issued a declaration at the
start of the summit, calling for international co-operation to manage the challenges and risks of
artificial intelligence. In May 2024 at the AI Seoul Summit, 16 global AI tech companies agreed to
safety commitments on the development of AI. == History == The study of mechanical or "formal"
reasoning began with philosophers and mathematicians in antiquity. The study of logic led directly
to Alan Turing's theory of computation, which suggested that a machine, by shuffling symbols as
simple as "0" and "1", could simulate any conceivable form of mathematical reasoning. This, along
with concurrent discoveries in cybernetics, information theory and neurobiology, led researchers to
consider the possibility of building an "electronic brain". They developed several areas of research
that would become part of AI, such as McCulloch and Pitts design for "artificial neurons" in 1943,
and Turing's influential 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', which introduced the
Turing test and showed that "machine intelligence" was plausible. The field of AI research was
founded at a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956. The attendees became the leaders of AI research
in the 1960s. They and their students produced programs that the press described as "astonishing":
computers were learning checkers strategies, solving word problems in algebra, proving logical
theorems and speaking English. Artificial intelligence laboratories were set up at a number of
British and U.S. universities in the latter 1950s and early 1960s. Researchers in the 1960s and the
1970s were convinced that their methods would eventually succeed in creating a machine with general
intelligence and considered this the goal of their field. In 1965 Herbert Simon predicted, "machines
will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do". In 1967 Marvin Minsky agreed,
writing that "within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will
substantially be solved". They had, however, underestimated the difficulty of the problem. In 1974,
both the U.S. and British governments cut off exploratory research in response to the criticism of
Sir James Lighthill and ongoing pressure from the U.S. Congress to fund more productive projects.
Minsky and Papert's book Perceptrons was understood as proving that artificial neural networks would
never be useful for solving real-world tasks, thus discrediting the approach altogether. The "AI
winter", a period when obtaining funding for AI projects was difficult, followed. In the early
1980s, AI research was revived by the commercial success of expert systems, a form of AI program
that simulated the knowledge and analytical skills of human experts. By 1985, the market for AI had
reached over a billion dollars. At the same time, Japan's fifth generation computer project inspired
the U.S. and British governments to restore funding for academic research. However, beginning with
the collapse of the Lisp Machine market in 1987, AI once again fell into disrepute, and a second,
longer-lasting winter began. Up to this point, most of AI's funding had gone to projects that used
high-level symbols to represent mental objects like plans, goals, beliefs, and known facts. In the
1980s, some researchers began to doubt that this approach would be able to imitate all the processes
of human cognition, especially perception, robotics, learning and pattern recognition, and began to
look into "sub-symbolic" approaches. Rodney Brooks rejected "representation" in general and focussed
directly on engineering machines that move and survive. Judea Pearl, Lotfi Zadeh, and others
developed methods that handled incomplete and uncertain information by making reasonable guesses
rather than precise logic. But the most important development was the revival of "connectionism",
including neural network research, by Geoffrey Hinton and others. In 1990, Yann LeCun successfully
showed that convolutional neural networks can recognize handwritten digits, the first of many
successful applications of neural networks. AI gradually restored its reputation in the late 1990s
and early 21st century by exploiting formal mathematical methods and by finding specific solutions
to specific problems. This "narrow" and "formal" focus allowed researchers to produce verifiable
results and collaborate with other fields (such as statistics, economics and mathematics). By 2000,
solutions developed by AI researchers were being widely used, although in the 1990s they were rarely
described as "artificial intelligence" (a tendency known as the AI effect). However, several
academic researchers became concerned that AI was no longer pursuing its original goal of creating
versatile, fully intelligent machines. Beginning around 2002, they founded the subfield of
artificial general intelligence (or "AGI"), which had several well-funded institutions by the 2010s.
Deep learning began to dominate industry benchmarks in 2012 and was adopted throughout the field.
For many specific tasks, other methods were abandoned. Deep learning's success was based on both
hardware improvements (faster computers, graphics processing units, cloud computing) and access to
large amounts of data (including curated datasets, such as ImageNet). Deep learning's success led to
an enormous increase in interest and funding in AI. The amount of machine learning research
(measured by total publications) increased by 50% in the years 2015–2019. In 2016, issues of
fairness and the misuse of technology were catapulted into center stage at machine learning
conferences, publications vastly increased, funding became available, and many researchers re-
focussed their careers on these issues. The alignment problem became a serious field of academic
study. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, AGI companies began to deliver programs that created
enormous interest. In 2015, AlphaGo, developed by DeepMind, beat the world champion Go player. Th
program taught only the game's rules and developed a strategy by itself. GPT-3 is a large language
model that was released in 2020 by OpenAI and is capable of generating high-quality human-like text.
ChatGPT, launched on November 30, 2022, became the fastest-growing consumer software application
history, gaining over 100 million users in two months. It marked what is widely regarded as AI's
breakout year, bringing it into the public consciousness. These programs, and others, inspired an
aggressive AI boom, where large companies began investing billions of dollars in AI research.
According to AI Impacts, about US$50 billion annually was invested in "AI" around 2022 in the U.S.
alone and about 20% of the new U.S. Computer Science PhD graduates have specialized in "AI". Abou
800,000 "AI"-related U.S. job openings existed in 2022. According to PitchBook research, 22% of
newly funded startups in 2024 claimed to be AI companies. == Philosophy == Philosophical debates
have historically sought to determine the nature of intelligence and how to make intelligent
machines. Another major focus has been whether machines can be conscious, and the associated ethic
implications. Many other topics in philosophy are relevant to AI, such as epistemology and free
will. Rapid advancements have intensified public discussions on the philosophy and ethics of AI.
=== Defining artificial intelligence === Alan Turing wrote in 1950 "I propose to consider the
question 'can machines think'?" He advised changing the question from whether a machine "thinks", to
"whether or not it is possible for machinery to show intelligent behaviour". He devised the Turing
test, which measures the ability of a machine to simulate human conversation. Since we can only
observe the behavior of the machine, it does not matter if it is "actually" thinking or literally
has a "mind". Turing notes that we can not determine these things about other people but "it is
usual to have a polite convention that everyone thinks." Russell and Norvig agree with Turing that
intelligence must be defined in terms of external behavior, not internal structure. However, they
are critical that the test requires the machine to imitate humans. "Aeronautical engineering texts",
they wrote, "do not define the goal of their field as making 'machines that fly so exactly like
pigeons that they can fool other pigeons.'" AI founder John McCarthy agreed, writing that
"Artificial intelligence is not, by definition, simulation of human intelligence". McCarthy defines
intelligence as "the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world". Another AI
founder, Marvin Minsky, similarly describes it as "the ability to solve hard problems". The leading
AI textbook defines it as the study of agents that perceive their environment and take actions that
maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. These definitions view intelligence in terms of
well-defined problems with well-defined solutions, where both the difficulty of the problem and the
performance of the program are direct measures of the "intelligence" of the machine—and no other
philosophical discussion is required, or may not even be possible. Another definition has been
adopted by Google, a major practitioner in the field of AI. This definition stipulates the ability
of systems to synthesize information as the manifestation of intelligence, similar to the way it is
defined in biological intelligence. Some authors have suggested in practice, that the definition of
AI is vague and difficult to define, with contention as to whether classical algorithms should be
categorised as AI, with many companies during the early 2020s AI boom using the term as a marketing
buzzword, often even if they did "not actually use AI in a material way". === Evaluating
approaches to AI === No established unifying theory or paradigm has guided AI research for most of
its history. The unprecedented success of statistical machine learning in the 2010s eclipsed all
other approaches (so much so that some sources, especially in the business world, use the term
"artificial intelligence" to mean "machine learning with neural networks"). This approach is mostly
sub-symbolic, soft and narrow. Critics argue that these questions may have to be revisited by future
generations of AI researchers. ==== Symbolic AI and its limits ==== Symbolic AI (or "GOFAI")
simulated the high-level conscious reasoning that people use when they solve puzzles, express legal
reasoning and do mathematics. They were highly successful at "intelligent" tasks such as algebra or
IQ tests. In the 1960s, Newell and Simon proposed the physical symbol systems hypothesis: "A
physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means of general intelligent action."
However, the symbolic approach failed on many tasks that humans solve easily, such as learning,
recognizing an object or commonsense reasoning. Moravec's paradox is the discovery that high-level
"intelligent" tasks were easy for AI, but low level "instinctive" tasks were extremely difficult.
Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus had argued since the 1960s that human expertise depends on unconscious
instinct rather than conscious symbol manipulation, and on having a "feel" for the situation, rather
than explicit symbolic knowledge. Although his arguments had been ridiculed and ignored when they
were first presented, eventually, AI research came to agree with him. The issue is not resolved:
sub-symbolic reasoning can make many of the same inscrutable mistakes that human intuition does,
such as algorithmic bias. Critics such as Noam Chomsky argue continuing research into symbolic AI
will still be necessary to attain general intelligence, in part because sub-symbolic AI is a move
away from explainable AI: it can be difficult or impossible to understand why a modern statistical
AI program made a particular decision. The emerging field of neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence
attempts to bridge the two approaches. ==== Neat vs. scruffy ==== "Neats" hope that intelligent
behavior is described using simple, elegant principles (such as logic, optimization, or neural
networks). "Scruffies" expect that it necessarily requires solving a large number of unrelated
problems. Neats defend their programs with theoretical rigor, scruffies rely mainly on incremental
testing to see if they work. This issue was actively discussed in the 1970s and 1980s, but
eventually was seen as irrelevant. Modern AI has elements of both. ==== Soft vs. hard computing
==== Finding a provably correct or optimal solution is intractable for many important problems.
Soft computing is a set of techniques, including genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic and neural
networks, that are tolerant of imprecision, uncertainty, partial truth and approximation. Soft
computing was introduced in the late 1980s and most successful AI programs in the 21st century are
examples of soft computing with neural networks. ==== Narrow vs. general AI ==== AI researchers
are divided as to whether to pursue the goals of artificial general intelligence and
superintelligence directly or to solve as many specific problems as possible (narrow AI) in hopes
these solutions will lead indirectly to the field's long-term goals. General intelligence is
difficult to define and difficult to measure, and modern AI has had more verifiable successes by
focusing on specific problems with specific solutions. The sub-field of artificial general
intelligence studies this area exclusively. === Machine consciousness, sentience, and mind ===
There is no settled consensus in philosophy of mind on whether a machine can have a mind,
consciousness and mental states in the same sense that human beings do. This issue considers the
internal experiences of the machine, rather than its external behavior. Mainstream AI research
considers this issue irrelevant because it does not affect the goals of the field: to build machines
that can solve problems using intelligence. Russell and Norvig add that "[t]he additional project of
making a machine conscious in exactly the way humans are is not one that we are equipped to take
on." However, the question has become central to the philosophy of mind. It is also typically the
central question at issue in artificial intelligence in fiction. ==== Consciousness ==== David
Chalmers identified two problems in understanding the mind, which he named the "hard" and "easy"
problems of consciousness. The easy problem is understanding how the brain processes signals, make
plans and controls behavior. The hard problem is explaining how this feels or why it should feel
like anything at all, assuming we are right in thinking that it truly does feel like something
(Dennett's consciousness illusionism says this is an illusion). While human information processing
is easy to explain, human subjective experience is difficult to explain. For example, it is easy to
imagine a color-blind person who has learned to identify which objects in their field of view are
red, but it is not clear what would be required for the person to know what red looks like. ====
Computationalism and functionalism ==== Computationalism is the position in the philosophy of mind
that the human mind is an information processing system and that thinking is a form of computing.
Computationalism argues that the relationship between mind and body is similar or identical to the
relationship between software and hardware and thus may be a solution to the mind–body problem. Thi
philosophical position was inspired by the work of AI researchers and cognitive scientists in the
1960s and was originally proposed by philosophers Jerry Fodor and Hilary Putnam. Philosopher John
Searle characterized this position as "strong AI": "The appropriately programmed computer with the
right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have
minds." Searle challenges this claim with his Chinese room argument, which attempts to show that
even a computer capable of perfectly simulating human behavior would not have a mind. ==== AI
welfare and rights ==== It is difficult or impossible to reliably evaluate whether an advanced AI is
sentient (has the ability to feel), and if so, to what degree. But if there is a significant chance
that a given machine can feel and suffer, then it may be entitled to certain rights or welfare
protection measures, similarly to animals. Sapience (a set of capacities related to high
intelligence, such as discernment or self-awareness) may provide another moral basis for AI rights.
Robot rights are also sometimes proposed as a practical way to integrate autonomous agents into
society. In 2017, the European Union considered granting "electronic personhood" to some of the most
capable AI systems. Similarly to the legal status of companies, it would have conferred rights but
also responsibilities. Critics argued in 2018 that granting rights to AI systems would downplay the
importance of human rights, and that legislation should focus on user needs rather than speculative
futuristic scenarios. They also noted that robots lacked the autonomy to take part in society on
their own. Progress in AI increased interest in the topic. Proponents of AI welfare and rights often
argue that AI sentience, if it emerges, would be particularly easy to deny. They warn that this may
be a moral blind spot analogous to slavery or factory farming, which could lead to large-scale
suffering if sentient AI is created and carelessly exploited. == Future == === Superintelligence
and the singularity === A superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that would possess intelligence
far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human mind. If research into artificial general
intelligence produced sufficiently intelligent software, it might be able to reprogram and improve
itself. The improved software would be even better at improving itself, leading to what I. J. Good
called an "intelligence explosion" and Vernor Vinge called a "singularity". However, technologies
cannot improve exponentially indefinitely, and typically follow an S-shaped curve, slowing when they
reach the physical limits of what the technology can do. === Transhumanism === Robot designer
Hans Moravec, cyberneticist Kevin Warwick and inventor Ray Kurzweil have predicted that humans and
machines may merge in the future into cyborgs that are more capable and powerful than either. This
idea, called transhumanism, has roots in the writings of Aldous Huxley and Robert Ettinger. Edward
Fredkin argues that "artificial intelligence is the next step in evolution", an idea first proposed
by Samuel Butler's "Darwin among the Machines" as far back as 1863, and expanded upon by George
Dyson in his 1998 book Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. == In
fiction == Thought-capable artificial beings have appeared as storytelling devices since antiquity,
and have been a persistent theme in science fiction. A common trope in these works began with Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein, where a human creation becomes a threat to its masters. This includes such
works as Arthur C. Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (both 1968), with HAL 9000,
the murderous computer in charge of the Discovery One spaceship, as well as The Terminator (1984)
and The Matrix (1999). In contrast, the rare loyal robots such as Gort from The Day the Earth Stood
Still (1951) and Bishop from Aliens (1986) are less prominent in popular culture. Isaac Asimov
introduced the Three Laws of Robotics in many stories, most notably with the "Multivac" super-
intelligent computer. Asimov's laws are often brought up during lay discussions of machine ethics;
while almost all artificial intelligence researchers are familiar with Asimov's laws through popular
culture, they generally consider the laws useless for many reasons, one of which is their ambiguity.
Several works use AI to force us to confront the fundamental question of what makes us human,
showing us artificial beings that have the ability to feel, and thus to suffer. This appears in
Karel ■apek's R.U.R., the films A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Ex Machina, as well as the novel Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick. Dick considers the idea that our understanding
of human subjectivity is altered by technology created with artificial intelligence. == See also
== Artificial consciousness – Field in cognitive science Artificial intelligence and elections – Use
and impact of AI on political elections Artificial intelligence content detection – Software to
detect AI-generated content Behavior selection algorithm – Algorithm that selects actions for
intelligent agents Business process automation – Automation of business processes Case-based
reasoning – Process of solving new problems based on the solutions of similar past problems
Computational intelligence – Ability of a computer to learn a specific task from data or
experimental observation Digital immortality – Hypothetical concept of storing a personality in
digital form Emergent algorithm – Algorithm exhibiting emergent behavior Female gendering of AI
technologies – Gender biases in digital technologyPages displaying short descriptions of redirect
targets Glossary of artificial intelligence – List of definitions of terms and concepts commonly
used in the study of artificial intelligence Intelligence amplification – Use of information
technology to augment human intelligence Intelligent agent – Software agent which acts autonomously
Intelligent automation – Software process that combines robotic process automation and artificial
intelligence Mind uploading – Hypothetical process of digitally emulating a brain Organoid
intelligence – Use of brain cells and brain organoids for intelligent computing Robotic process
automation – Form of business process automation technology The Last Day – 1967 Welsh science
fiction novel Wetware computer – Computer composed of organic material DARWIN EU - A European U
initiative coordinated by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to generate and utilize real-world
evidence (RWE) to support the evaluation and supervision of medicines across the EU. ==
Explanatory notes == == References == === AI textbooks === The two most widely used textbooks i
2023 (see the Open Syllabus): Russell, Stuart J.; Norvig, Peter (2021). Artificial Intelligence: A
Modern Approach (4th ed.). Hoboken: Pearson. ISBN 978-0-1346-1099-3. LCCN 20190474. Rich, Elain
Knight, Kevin; Nair, Shivashankar B (2010). Artificial Intelligence (3rd ed.). New Delhi: Tata
McGraw Hill India. ISBN 978-0-0700-8770-5. The four most widely used AI textbooks in 2008: Other
textbooks: Ertel, Wolfgang (2017). Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (2nd ed.). Springer.
ISBN 978-3-3195-8486-7. Ciaramella, Alberto; Ciaramella, Marco (2024). Introduction to Artificial
Intelligence: from data analysis to generative AI (1st ed.). Intellisemantic Editions. ISBN
978-8-8947-8760-3. === History of AI === === Other sources === == Further reading == ==
External links == "Artificial Intelligence". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.