Artificial Intelligence
In simple words
The root of the Atlas. Everything else in this map is a descendant of this one idea.
The fuller explanation
Artificial intelligence is the engineering discipline of building systems that perform tasks we would call intelligent if a person did them: recognising, predicting, generating, planning, deciding.
That definition is deliberately broad, because the field is broad. What matters for you as a builder is the split underneath it. Machine learning is the part where behaviour is learned from data rather than written as rules. Deep learning is the part of machine learning that uses many-layered neural networks. Generative AI is the part of deep learning that produces new artefacts rather than labels. Each is a strict subset of the one before it, and almost every confusion in AI discourse comes from people using the outer word when they mean an inner one.
You do not need to traverse this map in order. But you do need to know which region you are standing in, because the vocabulary, the tooling and the failure modes change completely between them.
Sources
Where this came from, so you can go past us.
Where does this sit on your route?
The free assessment places you on the same map and names which terms stand between you and the role you want.
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The Atlas shows this term with everything that leads into it and everything that follows, as one picture.
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