Microskills-IATD-Introduction to AI-Topic1 What Is AI

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In a black and white image, a woman sits at a laptop and types with her right hand. In her left hand
she cradles a smartphone.

A vertical blue band of colour on the left has white text that reads, 'What is AI? Introduction to
Artificial Intelligence’. On the right is a thinner red band and a white band alongside it. The white
band has the NSW Government's red 'waratah' logo in the top right corner.

A man stands in front of a concrete wall in an open room. He has thin red-brown hair and wears an
open-collared navy blue shirt.

TEXT: Lee Hickin – Director National Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Australia

LEE HICKIN:

Welcome to the introduction to AI microskill. This first module is all about the basics of AI. AI is the
use of computer systems to emulate or simulate as close as possible human intelligence. In other
words, it's the process or the ability for a computer program to both learn, think and apply reason to
a problem.

For example, today, when you use your phone to navigate to a destination, the software on your
phone i.e., Google Maps, has already learned all of the rules of the road and knows all of the roads
and all of the transport links out there - it has learned this information. It then uses AI to think about
your current location, and the destination you want to get to. And then applying logic using that AI,
it calculates the most efficient route based on traffic, time of day, and many, many other factors.

Another example, maybe social media platforms that use AI to learn about what your interests are,
and then apply that logic to find similar topics, to find things that you'd like to buy, or content from
advertisers that aligns to your interests. AI is everywhere. And its applications and use cases are
growing. It helps us to better understand the complex patterns in data. It can be used to simulate
human cognitive processes, such as speech, vision, and language. All artificial intelligence needs to
function today is two core things. First, it needs data to learn and train itself to understand a given
topic or a given problem. Then it needs a model or an algorithm to reason over that data and
provide an answer, a response or more likely, a hypothesis.

But today, what we think of as AI is really very narrow AI. It is only capable of learning to perform
very simple mono function tasks such as identifying an object in an image, or calculating optimal
routes. It is often overstated in the media and news; movies and TV have led us to believe that AI is
capable of human-like intelligence. This is not true today. This is referred to as advanced general AI
and is certainly the future of where AI is being developed today. This encompasses concepts such as
deep neural networks, and those will be covered in more advanced courses.

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DESCRIPTION:

On the left, the NSW Government's red 'waratah' logo on a white background. On the right, a thick
blue and a thinner red band of colour.

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