The term "artificial Intelligence" was first coined by John McCarthy, one of the founders of the discipline, in 1955. He was a young Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College in America, where he organised a summer workshop - known as the 1956 Dartmouth conference - to bring together a group of experts to develop ideas about "thinking machines".
So the idea of artificial intelligence has been around for a while but it may surprise you to learn that there is no single agreed-upon definition of what AI is.
It is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the capacity of computers or other machines to exhibit or simulate intelligent behaviour". And it's defined by the UK Government as: "technologies with the ability to perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition and language translation".
A broad definition that we often see used is that AI refers to "computers completing tasks near, at or above human levels of achievement".
To learn more about what AI is and how to make use of it, take a look at our course that explains it from scratch.