Actual Intelligence

I'm planning for some of my posts to get into the technical details of AI, some will just be my thoughts and opinions, and others will try to explain an aspect of AI in teams easy for everyone to understand. This is one of those posts. Natural language processing (NLP) attempts to understand, interpret, and generate human language. In my observation, it does fine at "generate," okay (I guess) at "interpret," but does not really "understand." NLP is based on statistics. It tries to guess what's next based on what word (or words) most often follow what you've typed. That is, most often in the training data. If the training data is really generic, then you might get one response, but if it's contextualized then you might get a different one. Here's an example: If I were to write "I had several bats in my garage, which..." the next few words could be "I would bring to baseball practice." or "I had to get ...

I have a love/hate relationship with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). This type of AI what most people think of when (if?) they think about AI. It's what's using large language models (LLMs) to build chatbots, create fake restaurant receipts, and help students cheat on their assignments. First, let me explain what I love about GenAI. It's great at helping people find information, the proverbial needle in a haystack. I love the idea of building an LLM from a company's HR policies and turning that into an internal-only chatbot that employees can use to get their questions answered. I love the idea of building an LLM based on my own writing so that I can generate content "in my own words" using GenAI. (Whether using it is against academic integrity standards is a different discussion.) I love the idea of artists using GenAI to customize their own work to make it more commercially viable. These are all ways that GenAI can be used to make pe...

My goal for this blog is to share my thoughts on Artificial Intelligence. I started a Ph.D. program in AI at Oregon State University last fall and have been thinking about starting a new blog ever since. There's just too much on my mind and I need to get it out and organized! My first blog post was almost 19 years ago was about my martial arts training. I may have to sneak some martial arts training posts into this one, becuase the subject is never far from my mind but that won't be the main focus. The title of this blog, Actual Intelligence, and the URL, actualintel.blogspot.com , are a double entendre of a sort since I work at Intel Corporation . I *may* share some thoughts about Intel here, but probably not many. I don't follow the tech news very closely and therefore don't want to risk publishing anything that's not already public. I expect that most of my posts will be about what I'm doing at OSU. I may recycle some old writing and/or blog posts th...