When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn What Does Narrow Artificial Intelligence (Narrow AI) Mean?
Narrow artificial intelligence (narrow AI) is a specific type of artificial intelligence in which a learning algorithm is designed to perform a single task, and any knowledge gained from performing that task will not automatically be applied to other tasks.
Unlike general artificial intelligence, which seeks to mimic complex thought processes, narrow AI is designed to successfully complete a single task without human assistance. Popular applications for narrow AI include language translation and image recognition.
Most AI applications in use today can be categorized as being narrow AI even if they offer a broad range of applications and use cases. For example, AI content generators form a subset of narrow AI (the single task being content creation), but they offer a broad range of opportunities to all kinds of content creators.
In a similar way, AI content summarizers are designed around a singular mission to summarize long content but will be valuable to many different users from marketers to students.
Narrow AI may also be referred to as weak AI.
Techopedia Explains Narrow Artificial Intelligence (Narrow AI)
Narrow AI supports many commercial applications, including recommendation engines. As learning algorithms become deeper, the applications of narrow AI are also becoming more layered.
There is still a lot of debate over how well computers will ever be able to achieve general artificial intelligence, given the complexity of the human brain and the current difficulty that data scientists and ML engineers have creating self-supervised machine learning algorithms.
