Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the field of building computer systems that perform tasks normally associated with human cognition, such as perceiving, reasoning, learning, and using language. It is an umbrella rather than a single technique. Early AI relied on hand-written rules and expert systems, while the modern field is dominated by machine learning, where behaviour is learned from data, and by deep learning within it. Today's visible systems are narrow: a model that writes text, recognises speech, or drives a car is built for that domain and does not transfer to others on its own. Artificial general intelligence, meaning a system matching human ability across arbitrary tasks, remains a research goal and a contested one. Practical AI now appears as language models such as GPT, Claude, and Gemini, along with recommendation systems, fraud detection, medical imaging analysis, and translation. A policy layer has grown alongside it, with the EU AI Act setting obligations by risk level. The label is applied loosely, which is the main pitfall for readers, since products marketed as AI range from a large model to a simple rules engine.