I cannot understand it. Help.
In: Engineering
AI computation doesn’t work the way you’re probably thinking. It’s not searching through a database of information each time to find your answers*.
Machine learning is all about finding patterns. To give a simplified example, how do you recognize if something is an apple? Well, you could have a database full of thousands of images of apples, and go through one by one to see if your input matches any of them.
Or you could spend some time beforehand to look at all those pictures, and realize, “Oh, I see. Apples are red (sometimes shades of green and yellow), roundish, and shiny.” And now when you see a new picture of an apple, you can just go, “Is it apple colored? Is it the right shape? Is it the right texture?” which is not only much faster, it’s more generalizable than just trying to match it against a database of pictures.
Modern language AIs rely on the fact that language, and the information it contains, is just patterns. The words “George Washington” are frequently near the words “president” and “United States.” That’s a pattern. And therefore an AI can learn that. It doesn’t need to search through a database to find the list of US presidents. It just learns a bunch of numbers that represent the relationships between words. Plus a bunch more math to further refine those relationships.
Another factor is hardware. Modern AI is designed to take advantage of the parallelization capabilities of hardware like GPUs, and companies are now producing special chips designed just for making AI computations fast.
* AI systems *can* be hooked up to databases or use web search, but those are more like add-ons. The fundamental way modern AI works doesn’t depend on them.
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