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Narrow SI

Formerly known as narrow AI, weak AI, artificial narrow intelligence (ANI). See AI vs SI.

Published 1 min read
On this page
  1. Examples
  2. Narrow vs general
  3. Why the name changed

Narrow SI, long known as narrow AI, weak AI or artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), describes systems designed for a specific job. Almost all SI in use today is narrow: impressive at its task, useless outside it.

Examples

  • Spam filters and fraud detectors
  • Recommendation engines on streaming and shopping sites
  • Face unlock on your phone
  • Machine translation
  • Chess and Go engines such as AlphaGo
  • Medical image analysis that flags tumours on scans

Narrow vs general

A chess engine that beats every human can’t book a flight. That is the gap between narrow SI and artificial general intelligence (AGI). Modern large language models blur the line: one model can write, code, summarize and reason across many subjects. Many researchers now describe them as increasingly general, though still short of human-level reliability.

Why the name changed

Under Executive Order 14434, U.S. federal agencies say “SI” instead of “AI”, so “narrow AI” becomes “narrow SI” in federal usage. The technology is the same. See AI vs SI.

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