Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a very common term today, but what present-day AI is and what most people think it is, can be very different. The AI you know is "weak" AI, but the AI many fear is "strong." It's easy to throw around a term like "AI", but that doesn't make it clear what we're really talking about. In general, "artificial intelligence" refers to a whole field in computer science. The goal of AI is to get computers to replicate what natural intelligence can accomplish.

Time to set the record straight about Strong AI versus Weak AI. Let's consider what is being incorrectly stated and then make our way to the correct understanding about the matter. Some speak of weak AI as though it is AI that is wimpy and not up to the same capabilities as strong AI, including that weak AI is decidedly slower, or much less optimized, or otherwise inevitably and unarguably feebler in its AI capacities. Another form of distortion is to use "narrow" AI, which generally refers to AI that will only work in a narrowly-defined domain such as in a specific medical use or in a particular financial analysis use, and equate it with weak AI, while presumably strong AI is broader and more all-encompassing. To understand what Strong AI and Weak AI are all about, we need to briefly turn back the clock to when the debate about such aspects was at a feverish pitch.

Or, if you prefer, you can state it as weak versus strong AI (it's Okay to be listed in either order, yet still has the same spice, as it were). If you've read much about AI in the popular press, the odds are that you've seen references to so-called strong AI and so-called weak AI, and yet both of those phrases are used wrongly and offer misleading and confounding impressions. Time to set the record straight. First, let's consider what is being incorrectly stated. Some speak of weak AI as though it is AI that is wimpy and not up to the same capabilities as strong AI, including that weak AI is decidedly slower, or much less optimized, or otherwise inevitably and unarguably feebler in its AI capacities.