Lesson 1: Welcome to the World of AI

You've already used Artificial Intelligence today.

Think about your morning so far. Did you unlock your phone with your face? That's a deep learning model analyzing facial geometry. Did an email go straight to your spam folder? That's a text classification algorithm. Did Google Maps route you around a traffic jam? That's an optimization algorithm powered by predictive ML.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Despite the sci-fi movies, AI is not magic, and it is not sentient. A great, non-technical definition of AI is:

"Software that can learn from experience to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence."

The AI Family Tree

You will hear three terms thrown around a lot: AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning. They are nested inside each other:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI): The broadest concept. Any technique that enables computers to mimic human intelligence.
• Machine Learning (ML): A subset of AI. Instead of giving the computer explicit rules, we give it data and let it learn the rules.
• Deep Learning (DL): A subset of ML. It uses massive "neural networks" (inspired by the human brain) to solve incredibly complex problems like understanding speech or generating images.

In the next lesson, we will look exactly at how this "learning" process happens under the hood!