Artificial Intelligence

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence does not refer to a single program but to an umbrella term covering a wide range of approaches, including rule-based systems, machine learning, and neural networks. Language models such as Claude are only one, currently highly visible, part of this much broader field.

How it works

The term Artificial Intelligence encompasses several fundamentally different technical approaches: rule-based systems with explicitly programmed if-then logic, machine learning, where patterns are learned from data instead of being programmed as rules, and neural networks as one method of machine learning. Modern language models are based on neural networks and are specialized for processing text.

Why there is no single definition

The term Artificial Intelligence is used differently in the media, marketing, research, and everyday conversation. Different definitions serve different purposes, making them appropriate in different contexts. As a result, discussions about AI often fail before they begin simply because people use the same term to mean different things.

The term itself dates back to 1956 and did not originate in 2022. Language models are only the latest and most publicly visible stage of a development that has continued for more than seventy years.

ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are therefore not synonyms for Artificial Intelligence. All three are language models—a single subfield of a much broader discipline. Today, many people use the term AI as if it referred only to language models, even though it also includes computer vision, robotics, and many classical AI methods.

Why the term has practical implications

• Expectations: Different meanings lead to different expectations of what an “AI product” actually is.
• Regulation: Legislation often defines AI more broadly and for specific regulatory purposes than research does.
• Comparability: Comparing “AI vs. AI” is often imprecise when the underlying technologies are fundamentally different.

Typical example

A chess program from the 1990s, a spam filter, and a language model such as Claude all fall under the umbrella term Artificial Intelligence, even though they share very little in terms of their underlying technology.

Further reading

Fundamentals

→ Artificial Intelligence as an Umbrella Term

Related terms

→ Language Model
→ Neural Network