Last week was another busy one in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
On Monday, October 30, in the United States, the White House announced a landmark 63-page Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. Shortly after, the Group of Seven or G7 countries released the Hiroshima Process International Code of Conduct for Advanced AI Systems.
Just a few days later, on November 1 and 2, international leaders from Academia, Industry, and Government convened in the United Kingdom at the inaugural AI Safety Summit, where participating countries and companies committed to better pre- and post-deployment testing and more responsible use of AI.
The additional regulation and push toward responsible development did not slow down industry's desire to fill every aspect of our lives with the wonders of AI. On November 1, Microsoft's long-awaited AI companion M365 Copilot became generally available for Enterprise customers. At the time of this writing, the service costs $30/month per user with a minimum of 300 users.
To close out the week, on November 5, Elon Musk confirmed his technology firm, xAI, would release Grok, a new ChatGPT competitor. This announcement was just one day ahead of ChatGPT parent company OpenAI's first developers conference.
This is just a tiny sample of recent developments. Although AI has been a part of our everyday lives for quite some time, since last fall's blockbuster release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, it seems that every other news article and new software release includes a reference to AI. But what is AI? And how did we get to this point?
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AI: A Brief History
The Encyclopedia Britannica defines Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings.
Although a December 2016 Forbes timeline providing A Very Short History of Artificial Intelligence (AI) begins with the 1308 publication of Ramon Llull's The Ultimate General Art, many other sources mark the start of our modern era of AI research and development in the 1950s.
On its site, Tableau provides an excellent overview of recent AI history. The site details the time from the 1950s until around 1980 as a time of creation, growth, and struggle. In the late 1980s, there was lull in interest and funding until the mid-1990s when AI began to make more frequent appearances in our day-to-day lives with advances such as the release of IBM's Deep Blue in 1994, the automatic vacuum Roomba in 2002, Microsoft's Xbox 360 Kinect in 2010, and Apple's SIRI in 2011.
In their AI Fundamentals for Everyone class, Educate360 instructor Jose Protea points out that the rapid development of AI in our current era, has been fueled by the convergence of great improvements in three technologies:
Graphics Processing Units (GPUs),
Cloud Computing, and
By now, most of us have heard or learned the basic ingredients of writing a good prompt for the most popular Large Language Models (LLMs):
Context
Background
Examples
Output Instructions
For example, instead of simply requesting "Provide song recommendations for my commute," we might say, " You are a Gen X driver who prefers 90s Alt Rock. Please provide 60-minutes of song recommendations similar to the 2004 Spider Man 2 soundtrack in a table listing song name, artist, release year, and song length."
Learn More about AI
But creating a simple prompt for a LLM is just the tip of the AI iceberg. Here are a few websites where you can learn more for free:
Until November 20, 365 Data Science is also offering free access to their course library, which includes 251 hours of video and 668 exercises. After that, prices start at $36/month.
These are just some sources of low-cost and free online training. Follow our blog and Flipboard magazines for more sources of free training. Visit our Eventbrite page for our upcoming courses and free webinars.
If you need onsite or customized training, we are here to help.
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