AI History
This English mathematician, widely considered the father of theoretical computer science and AI, proposed a famous test for machine intelligence in 1950.
What is: Who is Alan Turing?
In the context of generating text, this parameter controls the randomness of the output; a lower value makes the model more deterministic, while a higher value increases creativity.
What is: What is temperature?
If you ask me for a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, after the ingredients and instructions, I would likely add this important, non-culinary tip.
What is a reminder about washing your hands?
"so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens."
What is: Human? (William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow")
This IBM chess computer's victory over world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 was seen as a major milestone for AI.
What is: What is Deep Blue?
This three-word technique, abbreviated RLHF, involves using human feedback to rank model outputs, thereby training a reward model to fine-tune the LLM for better alignment.
What is: What is Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback?
In the film "Her," Joaquin Phoenix's character falls in love with an advanced AI operating system voiced by this actress.
What is: Who is Scarlett Johansson?
"The winter evening settles down. With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock.The burnt-out ends of smoky days."
What is: Human? (T.S. Eliot, "Preludes")
This early chatbot, developed at MIT in the 1960s, mimicked a psychotherapist and was one of the first programs to process natural language.
What is: What is ELIZA?
A type of neural network architecture where different parts of the network, the "experts," specialize on different types of data, a technique used in models like Mixtral and Gemini.
What is: What is a Mixture of Experts (MoE)?
In the film Big Hero 6, this inflatable "Personal Healthcare Companion" is programmed with over 10,000 medical procedures and a "caring" chip. To activate the Personal Healthcare Companion Baymax, his patient must first make this one-word exclamation
What is "Ow"?
"The old house leans into the wind,
A skeleton of memories pinned.
Each floorboard sighs a weary tune,
Beneath the pale and watchful moon."
What is: AI?
The period from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, marked by reduced funding and interest in AI research, is known by this two-word name.
What is: What is the "AI Winter"?
This is a specific type of evaluation metric for language models that effectively measures how "surprised" or uncertain a model is by a sequence of text; a lower score is better.
What is: What is perplexity?
In the video game series Halo, this AI companion provides tactical information and mission objectives to the protagonist, Master Chief.
Who is Cortana?
"I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast"
What is: Human? (William Carlos Williams, "This Is Just To Say")
The 1956 workshop at this college is credited with coining the term "artificial intelligence".
What is: What is Dartmouth College?
This two-word term describes the surprising and unpredictable new capabilities that arise in large language models once they surpass a certain scale of parameters and data.
What is: What are emergent abilities?
In the MCU, Tony Stark's J.A.R.V.I.S. was likely named in honor of this human character from the comics, who held the job of the Stark family butler.
Who is Edwin Jarvis?
"The harbor sleeps in gray repose,
A single gull above it goes.
The water, glass, reflects the pier,
And holds the silence of the year."
What is: AI?