AI History
Known as one of the "founding fathers" of AI, this computer scientist coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" and developed the LISP programming language.
Who is John McCarthy?
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?
In the 2014 biopic The Imitation Game, Alan Turing leads a team at Bletchley Park tasked with cracking the German's supposedly unbreakable encryption machine during WWII. What was the name of that German cipher machine?
What is Enigma?
"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 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?
This five-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?
This 2017 science fiction film features a highly advanced AI assistant named 'Joi'.
What is Blade Runner 2049?
"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")
Often considered the first AI program, developed in 1955 by Newell, Shaw, and Simon, this program successfully solved logic problems.
What is The Logic Theorist?
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)?
This lifelike AI doll from a 2023 horror film becomes a protective, but ultimately dangerous, companion.
What is "M3GAN"?
"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?
This 1950 paper by Alan Turing proposed the "Turing Test" to determine machine intelligence.
What is Computing Machinery and Intelligence?
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")
Developed in 1957 by Frank Rosenblatt, this was one of the first artificial neural networks, an algorithm intended to demonstrate basic pattern recognition.
What is the Perceptron?
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 1984 film "Dune," this character is an advanced 'Mentat' or 'human computer' loyal to the House Harkonnen.
Who is Piter De Vries?
"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?