ThreeRiversTech - AI Overview

Why is everyone talking about AI?

Artificial intelligence is not new, it already quietly orchestrates much of your daily life. It is in your phone, it curates your social media feed, nudges your shopping choices, and tries to make you a safer driver. Generative AI tools that are readily accessible to mere mortals without computer programming skills are new and came on the scene in November of 2022. Tools like ChapGPT have created an arms race to accelerate this powerful technology. It is a BIG deal! Some think AI will save humanity and unburden us from drudgery, others fear machine learning will outpace human control and end in cataclysmic disaster. Policymakers across the globe are trying to figure out the rules to harness this powerful technology without restricting helpful innovations. The vast majority of us, including lawmakers, have limited knowledge about AI.

What is AI?

A simple definition of artificial intelligence is "technology doing human-like things". Anyone with a computer or phone now has access to AI tools that can quickly generate text, images, audio, and video. This may revolutionize work and education in good ways, but it also presents new challenges.

AI seems like magic, how does it work?

There is a ton of new verbiage associated with AI, so try not to get overwhelmed. One term you should know is LLM = large language model. The various companies striving to be the frontrunner in AI have different, and competing LLMs. A simplified explanation is that an LLM is like a big library inside a computer, the computer has "read and learned" all the books, reference material, videos, audio, and movies in the library. A neural network is used to reference this material in much the same way an individual human can access their prior knowledge. If I say to you, what is the next word in this sentence? "Once upon a _______", you know the answer because of your background knowledge. AI knows the answer too, and it can absorb WAY more information than your human brain has time to learn. The AI competitors use different algorithms, which you can think of as a big math formula. AI technology looks at your prompt, then consults its "library", and proceeds to run the math formula. It runs the formula over and over and over again to generate each word and create content formatted in a way that makes it sounds like a human response (natural language processing = NLP).

You should also know the acronym GPT = generative pre-trained transformer. A GPT allows for the interface that lets you "chat" with the large language model -- you can ask the "big" library of knowledge to help you understand things, create things, and explore things. You offer "prompts" to chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Claude and you get output. The better your prompt, the better the output.

In addition to "thinking" about words, AI technology can also "see" images. Consider this scenario....you or a loved one are at a high risk for breast cancer. They go in for an annual mammogram screening which generates images. Do you want one well-trained, but fallible human to read the results? They might be feeling overworked or having a bad day because the kids were difficult that morning getting them off to school, or they drank too much at a get-together the night before -- you get my drift. Or do you want AI technology that has "learned" from its library of a million scans from a million different people to identify abnormalities in the image of a breast? Frankly, I want both, but if I had to pick one, I'd probably go with the AI tech.

Note: I did not use AI to write the copy above, I did put this copy into Gemini and asked for a fact check -- here is the output. Using AI this way is a fabulous learning tool and gives me immediate feedback. If I were a novice writer, this would help me scaffold my learning and guide me to improve without burdening an already overworked teacher.