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Applied AI · Beginner Level 🟢 · Session 1 · Yann Isola

What is artificial intelligence ?

It chooses videos for you, corrects your messages, and guides you on the road—all without being visible. Today, we lift the hood. Spoiler: it's not magic — it's even better.

🕰️ Travel through time 🎮 Play “AI or not AI?”
The big idea

AI in one sentence 💡

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a program that learns from examples, instead of being programmed rule by rule.

Think about learning to ride a bike 🚲: no one gave you a 500-page manual. You tried, fell, and adjusted. AI also learns from examples and mistakes—millions of them, very quickly.

😓 Traditional program

A human writes ALL the rules by hand: “IF the email contains “won 1 million” THEN spam”. Problem: it is impossible to anticipate every case.

✨ Artificial Intelligence

We show the program thousands of examples (“this is spam, this is not…”) and it finds the patterns on its own . This is ML — Machine Learning, or “machine learning”.

Journey through time

The great adventure of AI 🕰️

70 years of history in 5 incredible moments. Click on each card to discover the full story!

🇬🇧
1950

Alan Turing asks THE question

“Can machines think?”

Alan Turing, an English mathematician and wartime codebreaker who helped decipher Enigma messages, published a landmark paper. He proposed a game: if you exchange written messages without knowing whether the other party is human or machine, and you cannot tell which it is, does the machine “think”? This became known as the Turing test.

🤯 At the time, a “computer” was less powerful than a school calculator!
👆 Click for full story
💬
1966

ELIZA, the very first chatbot

The virtual therapist that fooled everyone.

Joseph Weizenbaum, a researcher at MIT, created ELIZA: a program that imitated a psychotherapist by rephrasing users’ sentences. “I’m sad” → “Why do you say you’re sad?” It used a simple technique, yet people still confided in it for hours.

😱 Weizenbaum was troubled by their reactions. Lesson: humans readily attribute intelligence to something that talks.
👆 Click for full story
♟️
1997

Deep Blue defeats Kasparov

The day the machine beat the world chess champion.

Garry Kasparov, considered the best chess player in history, lost to Deep Blue, the computer from IBM (International Business Machines). Global shock! But be careful: Deep Blue wasn't “thinking” — it was calculating around 200 million positions per second ⚠.

💪 Brute force, not learning. The real revolution will come later...
👆 Click for full story
🀄
2016

AlphaGo and the mysterious “move 37”

The move experts initially mistook for an error—and later recognized as brilliant.

Go has more possible board positions than estimated atoms in the observable universe ⚠, so exhaustive search is impossible. AlphaGo, created by DeepMind, therefore learned from human games and self-play. It defeated champion Lee Sedol 4–1.

🤯 In the second game, it played “move 37” – so strange that the commentators thought it was an error. It was a stroke of genius that no human would have dared. AI surprised its own creators!
👆 Click for full story
🚀
2022

ChatGPT: AI in every pocket

100 million users in 2 months ⚠ — a record at the time.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT. GPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” — simply remember: a program trained on enormous quantities of text to predict the next words . For the first time in history, anyone can chat with an AI, for free, from their phone.

🌍 The fastest adoption in technology history at the time ⚠. And you are part of this story!
👆 Click for full story
Under the hood

How does it work? In 3 steps 🐱

Every AI system, from a photo filter to ChatGPT, follows the same broad path. Just like a baby learning to recognize cats!

1
📦

Data

The program is given thousands of labeled examples: “cat”, “not cat”, “cat”… Data is the fuel of AI.

2
🧠

Learning

It looks for patterns on its own: pointed ears, whiskers… It makes mistakes, receives corrections, and adjusts. Millions of times, very quickly.

3
🔮

Prediction

It is shown a photo it has never seen → “97% cat.” It's a prediction , not a certainty. It could be wrong!

🐱 You did this too! Baby, no one gave you the definition of cat. We showed you lots of them, your brain found the pattern on its own... and one day you recognized a cat that you had never seen. AI is the same — in silicon.
It's up to you

🎮 AI or not AI?

Here are 10 everyday situations. Guess whether artificial intelligence is involved… Be careful, there are traps!

Question 1 / 10 Score : 0
📺
💡 The magic clue: ask yourself, “Did it learn from examples? Can it make a mistake?” If yes to both → probably AI!
Myth hunting

🔨 True or false? Flip the cards!

People make all kinds of claims about AI. Click a card to discover the truth.

Myth #1
🧠

“AI thinks like us”

👆 Click for the truth
❌ FALSE

It calculates probabilities and identifies patterns. ChatGPT predicts likely next words very effectively, but it has no awareness, desires, or human understanding of the world.

🦜 The parrot that says “hello” doesn’t wish you a good day.

Myth #2
😱

“AI will replace everyone”

👆 Click for the truth
🤔 NUANCED

AI mainly replaces tasks repetitive, not entire jobs at once. It transforms jobs and creates new ones — “prompt engineer” was not widely recognized before 2022!

🛡️ The best defense? Understand the tool. That's exactly what you're doing right now.

Myth #3
🎯

“AI is never wrong”

👆 Click for the truth
❌ FALSE

AI is often wrong — and the worst part is that it can be wrong with complete confidence! Chatbots can invent facts: we call them hallucinations .

🥇 Golden rule: an AI response must be checked; never take it at face value.