AI for Dummies: A 5-Minute Crash Course
AI is everywhere these days, and you’ve probably heard people tossing around terms like “LLM,” “prompting,” and “GPT” in conversations or on the news. But if you’re just starting out, you might be wondering: What does it all mean, and why is AI such a big deal right now? I’m here to break down the concepts for you and make you understand them in simpler words.
We’ll cover the following:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) — What it is and why it matters?!
- Large Language Models (LLMs) — The brains behind AI
- GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) — Popular AI
- Prompting — How you interact with AI to get what you need
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)— As the name implies, it’s about giving machines the ability to think, recognize patterns, and solve problems, much like humans do.
For example, think of Netflix. After you finish watching The Walking Dead, it instantly suggests more zombie movies. How does it know to do that? That’s AI in action!
That’s just one example. From waking up to your personalized Fitbit alarm to asking Alexa to turn on the lights, navigating to work with Google Maps, relying on Google at work, and unwinding with a Netflix binge — it’s all powered by AI. It’s more important than ever to grasp the basics of AI to avoid being left behind.
While AI has been around since the 1950s, the real breakthrough happened between 2018 and 2023, thanks to advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and the release of powerful models like GPT-3. These developments have taken AI to the next level, and understanding this underlying technology is key to grasping AI’s current impact
2. Large Language Models (LLMs) — A complex artificial intelligence system that is trained on a massive amount of text data that can generate and understand human language.
Dumber Version:
Think of an LLM as a super-smart friend who knows a little bit about almost everything. Imagine you have a friend who’s read millions of books, articles, and websites. They can quickly find an answer using all that knowledge whenever you ask them a question. They might not be perfect, but they’re good at giving you helpful information, having a conversation, or even telling stories.
Scientific Version
- Large: Trained on a large source of diverse data — Books, articles, code repositories, web pages
- Language: This model is designed to understand and generate human language. It can also mimic your style of writing.
- Model: A model is the mathematical representation of a real-world system.
GPT-4 for example is trained on about 13 trillion tokens ( words essentially) and 1.8 trillion parameters.
For context 13 trillion tokens = 36,111,111 4-hour Bollywood movies
What can LLMs do?
1. Text-Related Tasks
- Summarization
- Translation
- Question Answering
- Generation
- Storytelling
- Songwriting
- Explain concepts
2. Other cool tricks
- ChatBot
- Ideation
- Coding
- Reasoning
What can LLMs not do?
- Cleaning my dishes ( just kidding, I hear Tesla Robot can do a lot these days)
- Understanding emotions and reacting
- Originality in creation
- Providing real-time information
3. GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) — LLM developed by OpenAI & making it widely available on ChatGPT
Scientific Version:
- Generative: In short — It can talk like you, me, or even JayZ. It can mimic human language and their way of talking.
- Pre-trained: It’s been trained on massive amounts of data (books, websites, etc.) before you even start talking to it.
- Transformer: The type of AI architecture that helps it understand context and generate coherent responses.
While the LLM rose to fame with the GPT-2, 3.5, 3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 models, there are more competitors in space —
Popular AI Models (LLM Families)
There are several well-known groups of AI language models:
- GPT Family (OpenAI): This includes GPT-1, GPT-2, GPT-3, and GPT-4. They’re famous for creating text and answering questions.
- PaLM Family (Google): Uses a special design called “Mixture of Experts” and includes models like PaLM and Gemini (which used to be called Bard).
- LLaMA Family (Meta AI): These models are made to be efficient and easy to use, including LLaMA 1 and LLaMA 2.
- Claude (Anthropic): This model focuses on being helpful, safe, and accurate.
- Gemini (Google): Can work with text, images, audio, and video.
- Grok (xAI): An AI chatbot integrated with X (formerly Twitter), focused on real-time conversation and access to social media posts.
- Megatron-Turing (NVIDIA): A highly scalable AI model developed by NVIDIA and Microsoft for large-scale language processing
In future posts, I’ll talk about the comparison among these models for various tasks.
4. Prompting — How You Interact with AI
Prompting is how you talk with an AI, like giving tasks to accomplish for your smart friend. The dialogue you have with the AI is called “prompt”
When you can successfully get what you need from AI after talking to it, then you’ve just done “Prompt-Engineering”
The task can be — writing a story, generating code, or answering a question, the better your prompt, the better the AI’s response.
For example:
- Simple Prompt: “Summarize walking dead”
- Detailed Prompt: “Summarize Walking Dead and add 1 line for the main cast and summarize their roles. Show the output in a table”
By giving the AI more context or details in your prompt, you help it generate a more accurate and useful response.
Why Prompting Matters?
Think of prompting as a way to guide AI, much like steering a car.
A vague or unclear prompt will get you an unpredictable one, while a well-crafted one can lead to powerful, focused answers.
We’ll learn more about different prompting techniques, LLMs for different personas and multiple use cases, and a comparison of multiple LLMs in the next few articles.
And that’s a wrap! In just 5 minutes, you’ve cracked the basics on AI, LLMs, GPT, and prompting. Not bad, huh? Now you can wow your friends (or your dog) with your tech know-how!
If this was a fun read and you want more AI goodies, give this article a like and hit follow! Don’t forget to share your thoughts, drop a comment, or let me know what wild AI topic you’d like to dive into next.
Thanks for reading — now go impress someone with your new AI expertise!
