Mastodawn

Serious ask:

I need a crash-course in AI.

Context: my line manager has been asked to evaluate the use of AI at work. He's come to me to ask if I want to help, as he knows I hate it (and he does too), but I'm...vaguely aware...that not all things that are called "AI" are equal.

(like, the "AI" of NPCs in a game is not the same as the "AI" used to create the type of image we generally call "slop", right?)

We want to make sure we're armed with decent knowledge, because we don't want people to say "Oh, ignore them, they're just haters" if we're talking about something that maybe isn't the "bad" kind of AI (if such a thing exists - I don't know enough to be confident right now)

At the moment, *to the best of my currently limited knowledge*, our AI usage is pretty much limited to people using Gemini to create emails and transcripts of meetings.

(I hope that makes sense)

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D Ingram 3d ago

@neonsnake The world of AI is much broader than Generative AI. If there's a use for directed neural nets, machine learning, computer vision etc then be open to it. One way of shutting down being a forced sloperator is to use other AI where appropriate to "tick the box"

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NeonSnake 3d ago

@ingram Thank you

Would you be able to explain "neural nets, machine learning, computer vision" in VERY layman's terms to me?

And would it be possible for me - not very techy - to recognise them vs LLMs?

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D Ingram 3d ago

@neonsnake I'm not an expert, or even moderately skilled in the areas but have been to a course...

Neural networks have "weights" been neurons and the different methods have different ways of determining the weights. The undirected nets are basically self guided with a set of inputs and known outputs. The computer figures out based on probability. This is how a computer knows if the photo is a dog or a cat etc, or if cells are cancerous or normal.

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D Ingram 3d ago

@neonsnake In my opinion AI tools are best suited for interpolation working within the known things. Gen AI extrapolates and that's where the hallucinations happen.

The AI tool I've found most useful is audio transcription. I run the Whisper model on my low end Nvidia GPU and it turns rough audio into surprisingly good text.

Image classification and computer vision to identify good/bad products on a manufacturing line is another good use.

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NeonSnake

@ingram "Image classification and computer vision to identify good/bad products on a manufacturing line is another good use."

That makes sense to me - and is also something roughly relevant to what I actually do for a living, so I can picture it a lot easier than some other examples!

Audio transcription makes sense to me as well - am I understanding correctly that "Whisper" is run completely locally?

(not sure if this helps, but it feels a bit like when I used to use Photoshop to remove an unwanted object in a photo, and all of the "clever" stuff was done on my own PC? Is that an accurate analogy?)

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D Ingram 3d ago

@neonsnake Yes, you can run Whisper locally. I use pinokio to run it, and it's pretty much point and click. I think it runs on CPU alone, but Nvidia GPU makes it faster.
https://github.com/pinokiofactory/whisper-webui

GitHub - pinokiofactory/whisper-webui: Pinokio Installer for Whisper-Webui

Pinokio Installer for Whisper-Webui. Contribute to pinokiofactory/whisper-webui development by creating an account on GitHub.

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