AI foundations courses and concepts

Artificial intelligence is software that carries out tasks we associate with human thinking — recognizing images, following language, making predictions — by learning patterns from data rather than following rules a programmer wrote out in advance. The shift that matters is from instruction to example: conventional software does exactly what it was told, while a learned system produces an answer that is likely rather than guaranteed, which is why it can be impressively right and confidently wrong in the same sitting. Getting your footing means sorting out a handful of words the public conversation uses interchangeably — artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, generative AI — and working out which of them describes something that exists today.