Contents
Introduction
Let’s begin with the basics – what is AI? It means artificial intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to acquire, comprehend and apply knowledge. As humans, we have this ability to a certain extent… some more and most of us… less than others. When we think of AI, we aren’t just thinking of a system that is as smart as humans, we are expecting something more intelligent…
Understanding AI
What does more intelligent mean here though? Well, from a computer, we would expect that certain tasks are done faster, better and more conveniently than if a normal person were to do them manually.
But the AI we are talking about is not just a general program that excels at a particular task. We are kind of expecting the program to be able to improve, learn at the rate of a human (or faster) and apply that knowledge to a broad set of topics. And you might be surprised to learn just how far this ‘expectation’ has been realized already!
Applications of AI
Some things AI is currently used for are language interpretation, speech detection, object recognition. Some things AI technologies can do is predict weather, detect objects in images (have you explored how your camera can detect faces, and group certain images of a specific person together, knowing that person is the same one?), self-driving cars and a lot more…
Why We’re Here: The Impact of OpenAI’s GPT
The genesis of this website and I am sure many others that will follow suit, and even the emergence of whole industries that will follow, was propelled by Open AI when they released CHATGPT on November 30, 2022. At least that is the pivotal point for me, and if you’re just trying to wrap your head around this phenomenon called AI, it was probably for you too. That is when AI really made an insane advancement – a chatbot that can communicate as if it is a human.
My Journey into AI
My journey started a few months after that point, driven by all the buzz around the new topic.. I was a junior programmer at the time of the release, and I had worked with some very complex systems – and I couldn’t really wrap my head around how a computer can really be as smart as a person… or rather how could it have so much general knowledge, and be able to use it so well?
It didn’t make sense from what I knew, so I thought it was just a fad, people being overly excited for something that can be explained easily, or people being overly impressed by not so impressive feats. Perhaps you’re at this crossroad as well..
Fortunately or unfortunately, I was wrong. It is a scary proposition that something that even the creators do not understand that well, can mimic humans, and extremely intelligent humans at that… and it can do all that weird stuff… like to answer your questions precisely, confidently, and some of the time even truthfully…
Challenges with AI: Truth vs Deception
Now what do I mean by this? What I mean is that after you use chat GPT for a while you will realize that it’s very good at sounding like a human but it’s not necessarily truthful. If you have expertise in a certain field you can ask questions about it and as you dive deep you’ll see that it will probably make mistakes even if you use GPT4.
But why is this? Is the chatbot deceptive at it’s core, or is it just not smart enough? How can you get better results?
Well some of it has to do with the way you communicate with it – that is, there are certain ways you can ask questions so you get better results… but I am getting ahead of myself, all of this and more will be explored in my blog…
Expectations from AI
So what is AI really, and what do we expect of it? Do we want a chatbot that is omniscient and knows everything, a system that has all the right answers to all the possible questions?
Our Tasks Ahead
Currently we have lots of tools that are Artificially Intelligent… there are two challenges ahead of us as a humanity:
Learn to use these tools efficiently. As it stands, it is not enough to have a very good tool, we need to be smart about using it as well, to get to our goals. This will be the main goal of this website. Currently, this notion is called Prompting the AI.
Make the AI even smarter – this is the job of engineers and creators of the AI really, but we will dive into that in this blog as well at times.
Generally speaking, specialized AIs are very smart at what they specialize in, and you may not need to be very smart about the way you communicate with it. After all, if you’re using a very specialized tool, you probably have some understanding of the topic at hand.
Advice for Interacting with AI
What I would advise you to at this current stage is – do not take every reply you get from the chatbot as dogma, it is most likely riddled with mistakes, but if you’re just trying to learn about a subject, you can use it as an assistant.
And if you’re feeling lonely… AI can even offer a conversation!