Rotary Alexandra speaker this week was Steve Paix spoke on Artificial Intelligence (AI)

His business is String Theory Creative, and his interests include Media and Mental   Health, and Music. 

AI- What is it?

We have all been exposed to AI-those who use YouTube and Google will notice that these platforms recognise patterns in usage, and offer suggestions based on search history. 

A few technical terms to get your heads around-

Generative AI - generates new original content. The G in ChatGPT stands for generative.

Large language models - are a type of AI that can communicate using normal human language (no coding required)

Chat GPT uses Generative Pretrained Transformer. It is so fluent in human language that anyone can use it.

It has been trained on a huge amount of data- basically the whole of the internet, far more than any human could possibly take in. It is trained to recognise patterns in language.

A large language model is an artificial neural network ( or'Brain')

Many types of content can be represented by numbers  eg text, images, audio and video.

Large language nodes  are a type of 'guess the next word' machine which recognises  patterns of usage.

For example-

Dogs are.......................

 "           "   animals.....................

  "          "          "         that.............

  "          "           "            "   .bark...............

Imagine talking to a genius who is the sum of all human knowledge!

The biggest limitation of this technology is the user's ability to describe what they need, the 'prompting'

Chat GPT is free.

You can 'play' with it.

It has the potential to make life better, for instance in health care, reading and comparing scans, and recognising patterns and suggesting a predictive diagnosis.

Potential risks include job displacement, surveillance, loss of privacy, bias (according to quality of training)

Worst case scenario- AI Misalignment could theoretically pose an existential risk to humanity.

But Steve is optimistic. With ethical AI governance, and careful management essential he advised us

*Don't panic

*Be curious

*The machines are not coming for us (just yet) 

An informative speaker and musician.