Narrow AI

Definition

Narrow AI or weak AI refers to AI systems that are limited to specific areas of application and do not possess general, human-like intelligence. Such systems can sometimes be better than humans in their field, but fail as soon as tasks are set outside their narrow field. Almost all of today's AI applications are considered weak AI.

Examples: An image classification model can correctly recognize millions of images, but it cannot calculate or hold a conversation. A chess program plays chess excellently, but is clueless in every other domain.

Characteristics of weak AI

Weak AI systems:

• Habituate to one task: they are trained with data/experience of exactly one domain (face recognition, speech recognition, medical diagnosis, etc.).

• No self-reflection or awareness: They follow the given algorithms and optimize statistical goals, without understanding in the human sense.

• Not transferable: An AI model that recognizes faces cannot suddenly recognize vehicles without being retrained. The knowledge is tightly encapsulated.

• Supportive: Weak AI is usually designed as a tool that automates or supports specific tasks – not as an autonomous generalist.

Examples

Everything we currently experience as AI in everyday life is weak AI: voice assistants that only perform predefined functions; recommendation algorithms that make purchase or movie suggestions; navigation systems with route planning; self-driving cars (which are complex, but ultimately only cover a limited range of tasks – driving). These systems can be very powerful, but their intelligence is very limited.

A practical example: IBM's chess AI Deep Blue (1997) was able to beat the world champion at chess – an outstanding achievement – but was not capable of anything else. Similarly, DeepMind's AlphaGo, which beat Go champions, is a typical example: brilliant at one thing, useless at others.

Differentiation from strong AI

The term weak AI is often used in contrast to strong AI (also: general AI). Strong AI would be a machine with general thinking ability that can learn and act flexibly in any environment – something that does not yet exist. In the current reality, even the most advanced systems (such as ChatGPT) are still narrow AI, despite their versatility, because they function on the basis of what they were designed for (here: word processing) and have no real knowledge or skills outside this framework. In other words: weak AI is a tool, strong AI would be a counterpart. Until we reach strong AI (if ever), we need to keep in mind that even impressive weak AIs are still specialized programs – not omniscient computer minds.