When people say artificial intelligence , what do they actually mean? To understand what AI is—what it does, what it can do, and how it does w hat it does—it helps to step back and ask a more fundamental question: what is intelligence in the first place? Much of the confusion, hype, and fear surrounding AI today comes not from the technology itself, but from our often unexamined assumptions about what intelligence is and who or what can possess it. This question is not new,