What Exactly Is an AI, Anyway?

These days, every machine or tool seems to be AI-powered. Your refrigerator is now AI-
powered, your television is artificially intelligent, and even your toothbrush has AI in it.

So, what exactly is AI? An AI-powered machine is a machine that’s designed to emulate the
decision-making power that humans possess.

Modern AI does not depend on an if-then scenario paradigm to work. Such systems are fed
with large data in order to ‘teach’ how to approach a problem. For example, you can feed a
machine-learning model with millions of images of cats and dogs to train it to differentiate
between the two. An AI system created with such an ML model will be able to tell cats from
dogs – without any human intervention.

The ‘Large Language Models’ that you’ve been hearing about works exactly like this. The AI
system tries to gauge the next word that should be said after saying the first word. And this
loop goes on.

Similarly, self-driving cars are fed with data about cars and pedestrian traffic. This data helps
the AI system learn when to drive the car, what objects to avoid, which lane to take, and so
on.

Now that you know what a modern AI is, let’s find out if we can call it an Industrial Revolution
or not.