Artificial Intelligence is the umbrella term for computer systems that perform tasks associated with human cognition. In 2026 the word "AI" in commercial and policy contexts almost always refers to systems built on large neural networks trained on internet-scale data, particularly large language models and the multimodal systems derived from them.
The definition has shifted as capability has advanced. Early AI research in the 1950s-1970s focused on symbolic reasoning. The machine-learning era from the 1990s-2010s emphasized statistical pattern recognition. The current era, beginning around 2017 with the transformer architecture and accelerating after the 2022 public release of ChatGPT, is dominated by general-purpose foundation models that can be adapted to many tasks without task-specific engineering.
CrashBytes uses "AI" to refer specifically to this generation of systems unless context indicates otherwise.