For years, we have utilized a common type of AI known as Predictive AI. Predictive AI utilizes data on past behaviors to identify patterns and forecast potential future outcomes.

Predictive AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence that examines past data or behaviors to estimate what could happen next.

It examines trends — such as an increasing or decreasing line on a graph — and uses those trends to make informed forecasts about the future.

For example, when Netflix recommends a new movie based on what you’ve watched before, that’s predictive AI. When Gmail or Outlook automatically filters spam emails, that is also an example of predictive AI in action.

While Predictive AI utilizes data to forecast potential outcomes, generative AI learns patterns from data to produce something entirely new — such as writing text, drawing an image, composing music, or even generating computer code.

It predicts the next most likely word in a sentence. This makes it incredibly creative, but it also means it is probabilistic—it can be confidently wrong, especially with complex math! It doesn't "know" math; it knows what the language of math looks like.

Examples include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, among others.