How Many Types of AI are there?

Beyond Generative AI

How many types of AI are there? The Gartner Hype Cycle image shows us there are more than

25 types of AI currently tracked by the company. How is each type of AI different? The math formulas/alogrithms/code for each type of AI are designed to do different things. But if we look at all of AI as just one kind of technology, AI can be considered the next evolution of software. It is software engineered to such an extraordinarily complex and sophisticated level that, today, the software can improve on its own over time ("learn") and continue getting better as the code keeps running and processing data in different ways.

Generative AI: In the communications function we are almost exclusively interested in Generative AI. Generative AI code is designed to scan and analize terabytes of data from public and private sources of information - the web, government sites, company sites, etc. To oversimplify again, the list of instructions within the text-based Generative AI code compares every document, every paragraph, every sentence, and every letter against all other text-based data sources it has been designed to scan. This is what ChatGPT does. It is only a text based AI tool. There are other AI tools that work with video, image, and audio. All of that will become clear later.

As users, when we log into one of the text-based generative AI sites like ChatGPT, we can fill in the search bar with a request to "create an essay on the history of fashion in the US, 1800-1900." Because the AI code used by ChatGPT has already analyzed and compared every available information source covering the topic of US fashion, the AI formula can "generate" a fairly good essay based on what has been written in the past. An essay is generated by the ChatGPT sofrtware because it has been instructed to identify patterns across all of the information it has scanned and then "predict" what letter, word, sentence is likely to come after the letter, word, sentence in front of it.

While we humans can potentially read fifty articles and essays to draw on for an essay we write, text-based generative AI sites can draw upon millions of information sources to produce recommendated text. Therein lies one of the central power of AI code/technology - scan vast amounts of information, identify patterns, predict what will come next based on those patterns, continually improve predictions over time with or without human intervention.

While ChatGPT is the most popular generator of text output, there are other companies offering the ability to generate images, audio, video, code, and other types of output. Each operates essentially the same - analyze billions of data sourses and generate content by drawing on all the available information published on the topic as source material.

Here is a list of generative AI startups maintained and updated by Antler.