Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. It can be used for tasks like natural language processing, speech recognition, and machine vision. AI requires specialized hardware and software for writing and training machine learning algorithms. The main types of AI are strong AI, which can replicate human cognitive abilities and generalize across tasks, and weak AI, which is designed for specific narrow tasks like industrial robots or virtual assistants. AI provides benefits like consistent results for data-heavy tasks and virtual agents that are always available, but also has disadvantages such as expense, limited expertise in developing tools, and an inability to generalize learning.