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What is Artificial Intelligence?

Have you got your head around artificial intelligence yet?

In the past year, chatbots, like ChatGPT, and image generators, such as Midjourney, have rapidly become a cultural phenomenon.

Today the competition among big tech companies—Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Adobe—has reached a new level of intensity, with constant announcements and feature updates aimed at capturing user attention. Meta is investing heavily in AR and VR to make immersive experiences, Google on the other hand is integrating AI across search, productivity and more. OpenAI leads the era, pushing language models to new heights, while Adobe focuses on empowering creatives by adding AI to its design and editing tools. Each of these companies is not just competing but actively redefining how we interact with Artificial Intelligence.

What is AI?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, creativity and autonomy.

AI systems are trained on huge amounts of information and learn to identify the patterns in it, in order carry out tasks such as having human-like conversation, or predicting a product an online shopper might buy.

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How does AI learn?

The key to all machine learning is a process called training, where a computer program is given a large amount of data - sometimes with labels explaining what the data is - and a set of instructions.

The instruction might be something like: "find all the images containing faces" or, "categorise these sounds".

The program will then search for patterns in the data it has been given to achieve these goals.

It might need some nudging along the way - such as "that’s not a face" or "those two sounds are different" - but what the program learns from the data and the clues it is given becomes the AI model - and the training material ends up defining its abilities.

One way to look at how this training process could create different types of AI is to think about different animals

Over millions of years, the natural environment has led to animals developing specific abilities, in a similar way, the millions of cycles an AI makes through its training data will shape the way it develops and lead to specialist AI models.

So what are some examples of how we have trained AIs to develop different skills?

What are chatbots?

Think of a chatbot as a bit like a parrot. It’s a mimic and can repeat words it has heard with some understanding of their context but without a full sense of their meaning.

Chatbots do the same - though on a more sophisticated level - and are on the verge of changing our relationship with the written word.

But how do these chatbots know how to write?

They are a type of AI known as large language models (LLMs) and are trained with huge volumes of text.

An LLM is able to consider not just individual words but whole sentences and compare the use of words and phrases in a passage to other examples across all of its training data.

Using these billions of comparisons between words and phrases it is able to read a question and generate an answer - like predictive text messaging on your phone but on a massive scale.

The amazing thing about large language models is they can learn the rules of grammar and how to use words in the correct context, without human assistance.

"In 10 years, I think we will have chatbots that work as an expert in any domain you'd like. So you will be able to ask an expert doctor, an expert teacher, an expert lawyer whatever you need and have those systems go accomplish things for you."

Sam Altman - CEO of OpenAI

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