  With the rapid development of smart terminals and infrastructures, as well as
diversified applications (e.g., virtual and augmented reality, remote surgery
and holographic projection) with colorful requirements, current networks (e.g.,
4G and upcoming 5G networks) may not be able to completely meet quickly rising
traffic demands. Accordingly, efforts from both industry and academia have
already been put to the research on 6G networks. Recently, artificial
intelligence (AI) has been utilized as a new paradigm for the design and
optimization of 6G networks with a high level of intelligence. Therefore, this
article proposes an AI-enabled intelligent architecture for 6G networks to
realize knowledge discovery, smart resource management, automatic network
adjustment and intelligent service provisioning, where the architecture is
divided into four layers: intelligent sensing layer, data mining and analytics
layer, intelligent control layer and smart application layer. We then review
and discuss the applications of AI techniques for 6G networks and elaborate how
to employ the AI techniques to efficiently and effectively optimize the network
performance, including AI-empowered mobile edge computing, intelligent mobility
and handover management, and smart spectrum management. Moreover, we highlight
important future research directions and potential solutions for AI-enabled
intelligent 6G networks, including computation efficiency, algorithms
robustness, hardware development and energy management.
