Exploring the power and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence.
We are used to dealing with multiple sensory inputs: the information from our senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. We combine this information to make decisions easily and unconsciously. By contrast, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) have been mostly restricted to a single mode of communication – text.…
As the large language models (LLMs) that underlie artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT permeate more and more of daily life, people are increasingly coming to depend on them. Students use LLMs to help with their homework, programmers use LLMs to debug code or write new program code, and marketers to write descriptive content about their…
There are very few aspects of life that artificial intelligence (AI) is not embedding itself into, and the sports industry is no exception. There are many different use cases appearing, from athlete training to sports analysis, through to television coverage. When the marathon runner Tola Tamirat crossed the finish line in the 2024 Paris Olympics,…
As generative artificial intelligence (AI) flooded into the public consciousness in late 2022, corporations wrestled with how best to utilise and control it at work. Initial hopes of productivity improvements were tempered by the realisation that the public chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude were executing prompts on their servers. This content, which at work could…
The mining industry may not be the first that we think about when it comes to cutting-edge technology, unless it is the edge of a drilling rig. However, artificial intelligence (AI) is having an impact on mining just as it is having on more obviously high-tech industries like life sciences. It is a trillion-dollar industry…
Will AI replace your job? The fear of technology replacing jobs is not new. William Lee patented the mechanised loom for stocking production in the 16th century. In early 19th-century England, a group of textile workers, the Luddites, rioted and destroyed machinery that was automating the production of textiles, threatening their livelihoods. Often, technological advances…
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has many useful applications, such as automating repetitive tasks, language translation and coding software. However, its ability to produce “deepfakes” of images, audio and video is a controversial and potentially troubling area. There are two main approaches that are used in AI to producing deepfakes. The first is a technique called…
The word “robot” was coined in K. Čapek’s play ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ in 1920, which depicted artificial beings created to perform manual labour. The word “robot” (“robota: in Czech) literally means “drudgery”. Well before this, in 1770, “The Mechanical Turk” was exhibited, which played chess very well, but this turned out to just be a…
The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 opened the eyes of most of the world to the power of large language models (LLMs). This is the core technology that underpins ChatGPT and its rivals Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, etc, as well as their image-generating cousins Midjourney, Leonardo, Imagen, Firefly and Sora. Excitement about LLMs reached a…
Artificial intelligence requires plenty of computing power. Large language models (LLMs), the technology underlying generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, require vast amounts of data to train on, and in turn, this training requires massive computing power. Executing a prompt in an AI chatbot requires processing power, and it is estimated that executing an AI…