AI, minus the jargon
Everything you wanted to know but were too polite to ask the robot.
What is AI?
Artificial intelligence is software that learns patterns from data so it can recognise, predict or create things — like spotting cats in photos or writing a poem.
Machine learning
Instead of following hand-written rules, a model is shown millions of examples and slowly tunes itself until its guesses get good.
Large language models
Chatbots are trained to predict the next word in a sentence. Do that billions of times and you get something that can chat, summarise and code.
Generative AI
Models that make brand-new images, music, video and text from a simple prompt. Our robot mascot was born this way!
Use it wisely
AI can be confidently wrong and can reflect biases in its training data. Double-check important facts and keep a human in the loop.
Try it yourself
Ask an AI to explain a tricky topic like you're five, plan a trip, or brainstorm names for your pet rock. Curiosity is the best teacher.
Fun facts to drop at dinner
- →The term “artificial intelligence” was coined in 1956 at a Dartmouth workshop.
- →In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
- →In 2016, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go — a game with more positions than atoms in the universe.
- →“Hallucination” is the cute name for when an AI makes stuff up.
- →Neural networks are loosely inspired by how brain neurons connect.