Right now, AI is the internet’s #1 viral topic, filled with AI gurus spouting useless but impressive sounding information, because it gets attention. So allow me to cut through the noise and tell you exactly what you need to know.

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence is software that learns to perform a task without being given the exact steps to follow.

What Is Ai Useful For?

AI is useful for doing things that are “hard to explain how to do”.

The reason for this is because if you can explain how to do the task, you can simply write down the steps as instructions in code, run them, and it works.

For example, these things are NOT the kind of things we need AI for:

• Calculating profit - simply add up all the revenue and subtract all the expenses.
• Predicting the trajectory of a ball thrown in the air - we know the physics that defines the equations for figuring this out already.

Examples of things we know how to explain the relationship between

But for many useful things, its difficult (or impossible) to write instructions for how to do them.

Below is a list of things that are easy to do, but difficult to explain how to do. This makes them excellent problems to approach with AI. In many of these cases, AI is the only known approach to make these things work.

• Thinking of how to respond to a message or request (chatbots).
• Driving (autonomous vehicles).
• Walking (robotics).
• Drawing an image (image / video generators).
• Speaking.
• Summarising something usefully (like chatGPT can).
• Navigating the physical world (robotics).
• Deciding what code to write (coding assistants like Cursor).
• Analysing a spreadsheet you’ve never seen before.

Instead of following instructions, we do these tasks by applying what we’ve learnt from experience. Our experience is a form of data, and AI can be used to approach these problems by learning how to do the task from the examples in that data, rather than needing us to write down specific instructions to follow.

It’s hard to explain how we do these things, so it makes sense to use AI to figure it out for us