Before we talk about ChatGPT and Copilot, we need to understand what happens behind the scenes — how computers learn and how they make decisions.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science that aims to build software capable of mimicking human abilities — such as understanding, learning, problem-solving, and decision-making.
Humans learn from experience — a child touches a stove once and then avoids it forever. AI learns from data — the more examples it sees, the smarter it gets.
AI is not a single thing — it is an umbrella under which overlapping fields exist. Look at how these three terms overlap:
Without data, there is no learning. Every AI model you see today — ChatGPT, Copilot, Google Translate — has been trained on massive amounts of text, images, and sounds generated by humans.
How does a computer learn? There are three different methods — each method suits a specific type of problem.
The model learns from pre-labeled examples — each example comes with the correct answer. After training, it can predict answers for new examples it has never seen before.
No ready-made answers — the model searches for hidden patterns and similarities within the data on its own and discovers groups without anyone telling it what to look for.
The model learns by trial and error — it tries, gets a reward if it succeeds or a penalty if it fails, and repeats until it masters the task.
When the model learns, it is employed in one of these three main tasks:
Determining which category a specific item belongs to from pre-defined categories.
Is this email normal or spam?Grouping similar data together without prior knowledge of the categories.
What are the natural groups in this data?Predicting a continuous numerical value based on given features.
How much will this house cost?Proposed by mathematician Alan Turing in 1950. The idea: if you talk to a computer and cannot distinguish it from a human, it passes the test.
Massive amounts of data that exceed the processing capability of traditional tools. It requires special techniques to store, analyze, and extract value from it.
A branch of machine learning that uses multi-layered artificial neural networks. It is what power image and speech recognition, and language translation.
The final output of the training process — a mathematical or software representation that stores what it learned from data and uses it to predict or classify new data.
Click on each term to check its definition — was your answer correct?