The Top 4 AI Branches Right Now

Buzz led to confusion

Photo by Mila Tovar on Unsplash

Is Artificial Intelligence the same as Machine Learning?
Do Siri and ChatGPT use similar technology?

These and other questions arrive to me either from my students or Quora, where I answer many questions. So I decided to jot down a straightforward clarification of how AI technologies interrelate with each other. In other words, we need to have a simple AI branch classification. Not all branches, of course, but the most relevant ones right now.

It’s now a good moment to clarify which types of AI are there because:

• With all the buzz around AI, keeping a clear picture of its scope, branches, and application fields is hard.
• Many people are having first contact with AI through ChatGPT and other Generative AI technologies and believe these are all that exist in AI.
• As some AI branches are more prominent right now but were not popular before, so it’s a moving picture.

First of all, you have to be aware that AI researchers are mostly divided into two “flavors” of AI to the point that their positions are almost religion:

• Most of the first AI researchers proposed a “symbolic” approach to AI, meaning that their conceptual tools (mostly logic) used symbols to…