Understanding the Basics of AI


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What is Generative AI?

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a term that refers to a type of “AI algorithms that can create a variety of content types—including alphabetic text, images, and sound—based on patterns it has identified within a data set.” (Dobrin, 2023, p. 7) This allows the algorithm, once trained, to produce a wide variety of content.  As of early 2023, several open-source (free to all) language models, including the well-known ChatGPT, were made available.  These algorithms have been trained on vast amounts of natural language (primarily from the internet) to (essentially) learn how to create text in response to a request or other input. 

Prompts & Large Language Models

Prompts

What are Prompts?

A prompt is a natural language request submitted to a language model to receive a response. Prompts can contain questions, instructions, contextual information, short examples, and partial input for the model to complete or continue. After the model receives a prompt, it can generate text, embeddings, code, images, videos, music, and more, depending on the model used.

What are Large Language Models

What are Large Language Models (LLM)?

A large language model (LLM) is a computational model capable of language generation or other natural language processing tasks. For those who wish to gain a deeper understanding of LLMs, see the following resources.