9/24/25 – Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to computer systems designed to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as recognizing patterns, making decisions, or understanding language. At the heart of many modern AI systems are neural networks, which consist of interconnected layers of artificial “neurons” or nodes. Each neural network has an input layer that receives data (like pixel values from an image), one or more hidden layers that process and transform this information, and an output layer that produces the final result (like “cat” or “dog”). Individual nodes receive multiple inputs, multiply each by a weight, sum them together, and then apply an activation function like the sigmoid function, which squashes the result into a smooth curve between 0 and 1, helping the network make probabilistic decisions. During supervised learning, the network is trained on labeled examples—showing it thousands of photos labeled as “cat” or “dog”—and gradually adjusts the weights between nodes to minimize prediction errors. Through this process of seeing examples and correcting mistakes, the hidden layers learn to detect increasingly complex features: early layers might recognize edges and shapes, while deeper layers identify whiskers, ears, and other cat-specific patterns, ultimately enabling the network to classify new images it has never seen before.
Generated with assistance from Claude AI by Anthropic