The sudden emergence of AI into the public consciousness and mass availability of AI chat bots (Grok, ChatGPT etc.) is impacting politics, economics, the art world and our personal and work lives. The programming work is supposedly being revolutionised by the new art of 'vibe coding', radical lowering the barriers to develop and publish software. Even if we sought to embrace the opportunities and the affordances of these miracle algorithms, say to shape new technologies less in the image of western-centric hetero-normative values, we should remain alert to the dangers of censorship, surveillance and bias these new technologies entail and increasing disturbing authoritarian tendencies of the companies that control them.
With all that considered, lets take a breath and consider the how we came to this place. We will briefly review the history of AI research and its commercialisation that led to the tools we have today. In revieiwing the techological foundations of large language models (LLMs) we will strip away the hype and gain intuition for what the AI systems of today are and are not capable of.
We will then introduce and use a number of cutting-edge tools and approaches moving from simple LLMs and chatbots to consider agents, RAG systems and AI assistants. We will focus where possibly on open-source tools and open-models.
With all that considered, lets take a breath and consider the how we came to this place. We will briefly review the history of AI research and its commercialisation that led to the tools we have today. In revieiwing the techological foundations of large language models (LLMs) we will strip away the hype and gain intuition for what the AI systems of today are and are not capable of.
We will then introduce and use a number of cutting-edge tools and approaches moving from simple LLMs and chatbots to consider agents, RAG systems and AI assistants. We will focus where possibly on open-source tools and open-models.