With time, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has managed to be the cornerstone of technological advancement touching multiple areas from healthcare to entertainment. But then, here are a broad class of technologies it subsumes and they fall into two categories body; so there is Weak AI and Strong AI. To move on we should now focus in understanding the differences between AI and AGI, to understand its breakthroughs beyond that point but also where it stops.

Narrow AI, also called Weak AI, is that which focused on one narrow task or a very specific subset of tasks. Because these systems function within strict boundaries and without the ability to generalize their knowledge beyond their purpose, Weak AI is not conscious or self-conscious: it works with predefined algorithms and data.

Examples of weak AI include

Virtual Assistants — systems like Siri with the capability of setting reminders, playing music or answering questions based on voice commands.

Recommender Systems: Recommender systems are the algorithms for products/movie recommendation on platforms like Netflix and Amazon, based on user preferences and behavior.

Within the realm of AI, we have something called Strong artificial intelligence (General AI), which is an entirely different story but far more amazing. Strong AI, on the other hand, seeks to exhibit general intelligence rather than specific instances of humanlike cognitive function. Such a system would be able to comprehend, learn and utilize knowledge in many different kinds of tasks or reasoning contexts — with some form of artificial consciousness — self-awareness.

Strong AI Properties

Generalize: By applying knowledge in one case to novel situations and problems, as humans transfer skills from one domain another.

Strong AI would be a Strong Artificial Consciousness, enabling true Self awareness (that is the machine understands), corresponding to simple consciousness unto itself and having decision making properties.

Adaptive Learning: Instead of being limited to pre-programmed instructions, weak AI may come up with appropriate answers based on broad experiences like human beings.
As of now, Strong AI is only a speculative concept and under open-ended research process. More importantly, it brings up big questions in terms of the ethics and philosophy behind consciousness itself- as well as what kind of changes this could bring about on society.

A Comparison between A weak AI and strong AI

Breadth: Weak AI is a subset powered by narrow algorithms to perform specific tasks well. Instead, Strong AI desires to achieve a comprehensive set of perceptual/cognitive processes that would equal (or surpass) the entirety the human intellect.

Weak AI systems are non-flexible and specialized, which means they can only do specific tasks that regard their design; On the other hand, strong AI would be able to learn from any given information.

Consciousness: Weak AI has no self-conscious or conscious while Strong AI wants to be able to understand.

Challenges of both Weak AI and Strong AI:

Narrow AI: The main hurdle may be more about a lack of flexibility and things getting done other than based on preset values. Also, the data privacy and ethical usage of AI technologies are a big issue.

Large AI: Large, Strong AI is still a long way off because creating machines which can truly understand and are conscious provokes both technical and philosophical challenges. Ethical implications of these advances have also been on everyone’s lips.

Understanding the difference between Weak AI and Strong AI is basic to appreciating what currently exists with Artificial Intelligence (AI) today, as well as possibilities in respect of how it will further develop going forward. Weak AI is interwoven with daily life at this point whereas Strong AI for now is a distant end goal that will have massive implications of what technology and societal struggle await humanity in the future. While the road to Strong AI will define a great deal of how intelligent systems evolve and what part they play in our world as research and development continues.