Types of AI
You'll be able to
- Distinguish narrow, general, and superintelligent AI
- Map today's products to the correct category
- Understand the difference between ability and awareness
AI is usually classified by how general its ability is. Most systems you use today are Narrow AI: they excel at one specific task — detecting spam, recommending a video, translating a sentence — but cannot transfer that skill to unrelated tasks.
General AI (AGI) would match human flexibility across many domains. Superintelligence is a hypothetical system smarter than humans in nearly every dimension. None of these exist in a full form yet — everything we use is narrow, powerful automation.
Three categories
- Narrow AI — today's assistants, vision models, and recommender systems.
- General AI (AGI) — human-level flexibility across domains; still a research goal.
- Superintelligence — exceeds human ability broadly; speculative and heavily debated.
Capability is not awareness. A model that writes essays does not understand them; it has learned statistical patterns from text.
Challenge
Sort the systems
Classify each into narrow or general: a chess engine, a self-driving car's vision system, a voice assistant, a translation tool. Justify each briefly.
Knowledge Check
Types of AI
A chatbot that answers questions about history is best described as:
Today's large language models are examples of general artificial intelligence.
Answer all questions to submit.