Glossary

This type of website for a business is suitable for companies that sell products or services to another company, which is an intermediate buyer who then sells the product to the final customer. They help other companies establish a solid foundation for the long-term commercial interrelations between them. B2B websites may come in various types. One helps to receive information from partners, and the other creates accounts for payment for the products or services and establishes contracts.

B2C websites for business are the most popular. Web platforms that follow the B2C model are suitable for companies selling products or services directly to customers online. A customer can view products on the page and choose and order a product. The Business to Consumer model doesn't require a middleman and reduces the cost of the goods for the ultimate consumers. B2C sites aim to make it easy for shoppers to buy products end enjoy this process.

Consumer to Consumer website serves as a mediator between clients and gives an opportunity to sell or purchase goods directly. Through C2C web service, consumers can sell their assets like cars or rent a room by publishing their information on the website. Likewise, one customer may buy a product from another consumer by viewing the description on the website.

For instance, Airbnb is a typical C2C web service. Airbnb allows travelers to book homes or rent apartments worldwide.

Websites following C2B business models are the least widespread among the other types of business models. In C2B, individuals offer goods and services to companies in exchange for payment. It is a complete reversal of B2B or B2C, where companies offer their services to customers. C2B web services provide an opportunity for consumers to set prices for the products they would like to buy. The C2B website finds a seller eager to sell the goods for the consumer's price. C2B businesses, as well as consumers, profit from the flexibility of such services.

Reactive machines are AI systems with no memory and are task-specific, meaning that an input always delivers the same output. This type of AI is reactive. It performs "super" AI because the average human would not be able to process a customer's entire Netflix history and feedback customized recommendations. Reactive AI, for the most part, is reliable and works well in inventions like self-driving cars. However, it doesn't have the ability to predict future outcomes unless it has been fed the appropriate information.

This algorithm imitates how our brains' neurons work together, meaning it gets smarter as it receives more data to train on. Deep learning improves image recognition and other types of reinforcement learning. 

Unlike reactive machines, they can look into the past and monitor specific objects or situations over time. Then, these observations are programmed into the AI so that its actions can perform based on both past and present moment data. But in limited memory, this data isn't saved into the AI's memory as experience to learn from, the way humans might derive meaning from their successes and failures. Instead, the AI improves over time as it's trained on more data.

The first two types of AI, reactive machines and limited memory, are types that currently exist. Theory of mind and self-awareness are AI types that will be built in the future. As such, there have yet to be any real-world examples.

If it is developed, the theory of mind AI could understand the world and how other entities have thoughts and emotions. In turn, this affects how they behave with those around them. 

Humans understand how our thoughts and emotions affect others and how others affect us—this is the basis of our society's human relationships. In the future, theory of mind AI machines could be able to understand intentions and predict behavior, as if to simulate human relationships.

The grand finale for the evolution of AI would be to design systems that have a sense of self, a conscious understanding of their existence. This type of AI does not exist yet.

This goes a step beyond the theory of mind AI and understanding emotions to being aware of themselves, their state of being, and being able to sense or predict others' feelings. For example, "I'm hungry" becomes "I know I am hungry" or "I want to eat lasagna because it's my favorite food." 

We are a long way from self-aware AI because there is still so much to uncover about the human brain's intelligence and how memory, learning, and decision-making work.