Novembre 30^th 2022: OpenAI revels it’s LLM, ChatGPT! One of the first examples of Generative AI. But, exactly, What GenAI is?

Let’s start moving some step back to types of Artificial Intellingence: Rules based AI and Learning based AI.

Rule Based AI

Imagine one of the rovers on Mars. What does it happen when an obstacol is in front of him? Simple, developers provided a set of rules to apply when something new happen: if you find an obstacol go back, move to the right and go forward. That’s exactly the same rule that our home cleaning robot follows in our houses.

The most important thing is that not the rover on Mars, not our clieaning robot have been informed about the planimetry of the house or of Mars. So they have to improvise and learn where the obstacole is so to not run into it again.

With Rule based AI we provide rules to the AI model, the model adapt to a new (never seen) input appling that rules and learn something new to be used for the future.

This is the basis for games’ AI model such as chess, or Go.

Learnig Based AI (a.k.a Machine Learning)

What if I provide to an AI system the rule to… create yourself the rules extracting them from a very very very very large amount of data? Well, this is a Machine Learning algorithm (in a very very very very simple way).

Let the machine find the connections among information provided so to be ready to categorize in the right way next (never seen) input.

As you can imagine, this implies that training data need to be very very very very accurate and that you need also a set of testing data to verify the inferenced rules are… well, the right ones. This is called unsupervised learning.

Maybe, you can also try to supervise the learning process so to correct some non valid inferenced rule. In that case is called superviced learning.

When the tasks became really difficult that machine learning need to jump to Deep Learning, usign different algorithms. To semplify, if with a machine learning algorithm your AI model is able to indentify with a picture if there is a human or a plant, with deep learning algorithms your AI model is able to understand in the same picture the emotions that the human seems to feel. This is a complete new the level of complexity.

Generative AI

When a Deep Learning AI Model is used to create content, you have a Generative AI Model! Very simple.

LLM (Large Language Model) is one of the Generative AI models.

So, Generative AI models suffer from the same issues as Machine Learning and Deep Learning models. Bad training data? Then you will have lot of hallucinations (yes, this is the technical term to identify errors in contente generated by AI).

And that’s it. In a very very very simple way!