What is AI Tutorial: The Field

TL;DRAI is the field of building systems that perform tasks we associate with human intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence spans any technique that lets machines do "smart" things — perceive, reason, decide, generate. It's an umbrella: machine learning is a subset, deep learning a subset of that, and today's large language models a recent branch. "AI" today usually means systems that learn patterns from data rather than follow hand-written rules.

Key points

Umbrella for machine "intelligence" tasks
ML ⊂ AI; deep learning ⊂ ML; LLMs are recent
Modern AI learns from data, not hand-coded rules
Perception, reasoning, decision, generation

Common mistakes

Equating "AI" only with chatbots
Assuming AI understands like a human
Conflating AI, ML, and deep learning as identical

Try it: Draw the nesting: AI ⊃ ML ⊃ deep learning ⊃ LLMs.

Example code

<!doctype html><html><head><meta charset="utf-8"></head>
<body style="background:#06040d;color:#e6e0ff;font-family:monospace;padding:20px"><pre>AI ⊃ machine learning ⊃ deep learning ⊃ LLMs
rules-based (old) → learned-from-data (modern)</pre></body></html>

Open the interactive lesson →

AI History · The Three Winters →