Artificial Intelligence is one of the buzz concepts of the last few years, and its growing complexity makes it sometimes hard to wrap one’s head around. In simpler terms, it’s about creating programs and systems that can make decisions, solve problems, and even recognize patterns on their own without being explicitly programmed. AI helps computers perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, like understanding language, recognizing objects in images, playing games, using patterns and trends within vast amounts of data to make predictions, and much more. To strip it down to its main stages, AI is like making a cake: you gather ingredients, follow a recipe, mix things together, bake it, and then you watch the results unfold.

Infographic comparing AI to a cake

Ingredients (Data): Just like you need ingredients for a cake, AI needs data. Lots of it… like pictures, texts, numbers, and more. This data helps the AI learn patterns and make decisions.

Recipe (Algorithm): A recipe guides you through the steps of making a cake. In AI, an algorithm is like a recipe — a set of instructions that tells the computer what to do with the data in order to learn and make decisions.

Mixing and Baking (Training): Mixing ingredients and baking is where your cake takes shape. With AI, the algorithm processes the data, learns from it, and improves over time. This repeated learning process is called training.

Awesome Cake (AI Result): After about 30 minutes at 350°F… your cake is done. With AI, after training, you get a system that can make predictions, recognize things, or solve problems based on what it learned from the data.

Improvement (AI Refinement): Just like you might adjust your recipe for the next cake, AI can be refined by tweaking the algorithm or feeding it more data to make it even better at its task.

In short, just like a real-life cake baking, results may vary depending on the quality of the data and the algorithm used.  However, like a baker perfecting their cake recipe, AI systems can be improved and refined, to get closer to the mouth-watering, desired results.

Author:
Doru Lupeanu

Marketing Director @KnowledgeOne. Strategist. Movie scriptwriter. Transylvanian. Fanatic anime consumer.