Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the field of building machine-based systems that, given explicit or implicit objectives, infer from their inputs how to produce outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations or decisions that influence physical or virtual environments (the OECD’s definition of an AI system, revised 2023-11-29; the revision added that systems vary in autonomy and adaptiveness after deployment, and that “content” is a possible output so generative AI is covered). Much of modern AI is built on machine learning, and since 2022 generative models, above all large language models, which power chat assistants and autonomous agents. For terminology see ai-glossary-terms; for the vault overview see KB-AI.

In 2026

The OECD definition inspired the definition of an AI system in the EU AI Act (Art. 3(1)), whose rules and 2026 amendments are in ai-regulation-and-policy. For the long-term goal some labs state see artificial-general-intelligence; for how models are compared see massive-multitask-language-understanding. For the current model landscape see ai-models rather than this concept note, since model names change quickly.

Sources

• https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/ai-system-definition-update (accessed 2026-10-01)