Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence¹ is the study of intelligent agents that receive percepts from the environment and perform actions.

Each such agent implements a function that maps percept sequences to actions.

The field of artificial intelligence attempts not just to understand, but also to build intelligent entities.

Definitions

There are eight definitions of AI laid out along two dimensions:

• definitions on top are concerned with thought processes and reasoning,
• whereas the ones on the bottom address behavior.

The definitions on the left measure success in terms of fidelity to human performance, whereas the ones on the right measure against an ideal performance measure, called rationality. A system is rational if it does the "right thing," given what it knows.

Dimensions	Human performance	Ideal performance (rationality)
Thought processes and reasoning	Thinking Humanly	Thinking Rationally
Behavior	Acting Humanly	Acting Rationally

Thinking Humanly

"The exciting new effort to make computers think ... machines with minds, in the full and literal sense." (Haugeland, 1985)

"[The automation of] activities that we associate with human thinking, activities such as decision-making, problem solving, learning ..." (Bellman, 1978)

Thinking Rationally

"The study of mental faculties through the use of computational models." (Charniak and McDermott, 1985)

"The study of the computations that make it possible to perceive, reason, and act." (Winston, 1992)

Acting Humanly

"The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people." (Kurzweil, 1990)

"The study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better.” (Rich and Knight, 1991)

In order to be Acting humanly, the computer would need to possess the following capabilities:

• natural language processing to enable it to communicate successfully in English;
• knowledge representation to store what it knows or hears;
• automated reasoning to use the stored information to answer questions and to draw new conclusions;
• machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate patterns.

Acting Rationally

"Computational Intelligence is the study of the design of intelligent agents." (Poole et al., 1998)

"AI ... is concerned with intelligent behavior in artifacts." (Nilsson, 1998)

Misuse of the definition

Currently in tech industry "AI" is trending abbreviation and is used as a marketing term talking about Large Language Model-driven implementations of computer systems.

This is great trivialization of AI as a field of study, because LLM is merely a one particular type of Machine Learning, which itself is a capability a computer must possess under Acting Humanly definition of AI. As mentioned above, there are a total of eight definitions of AI grouped by two dimensions.

Therefore every time someone mentions "AI tools", "AI features" or "AI implementation", etc. - ask them to define "AI" first.

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1. Russell, S. J., Norvig, P. & Davis, E. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, 2010). ↩︎