Exploring the power and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence.
Large language models (LLMs) have been heavily promoted as productivity tools for enterprises in a range of use cases, such as customer chatbots, content creation for marketing material, and enabling employees to easily access and summarise documents like product documentation or product manuals. There are other use cases, such as automation of business processes like…
The world of technology moves rapidly, and it is hard to build a sustainable competitive advantage. Just ask Blackberry (business smartphones), Nokia (mobile phones), Yahoo (search), AOL (email and chat), MySpace (social network) and Kodak (film). Technology companies seek to build a “moat”, a durable competitive advantage that is hard to copy. Such a moat…
We usually think of AI running on web-connected servers in the cloud somewhere, but what about AI running on a stand-alone device, not connected to the internet? There are actually more examples of this than you may realise. To start with, security cameras detect motion or objects locally without sending data to the cloud. Self-driving…
One mantra regarding large language models (LLMs) is that bigger is better. Parameters are the learned weights of a model, while tokens represent the pieces of text used to train it. The more training tokens an LLM sees, the more fluent the answers it produces. This assumption that bigger is better is what has driven…
Music has evolved over the centuries, from the first bone flutes (dating back to at least 38,000 BC) to the invention of the piano in Italy in 1700. The theremin, invented in 1920 by a Russian physicist, is played by a performer moving their hands near two antennas. However, it was only in more recent…
It is now three years since ChatGPT was launched, and introduced most of the world to generative AI. Corporations and public sector bodies alike have rushed to adopt this latest technology, but with limited success. The proportion of AI projects that actually succeed has been estimated at up to 20% (RAND) 13% (Gartner) and 5%…
One cutting-edge area where AI is used is financial market trading. The banking industry has always been an early adopter of technology, and algorithmic trading is nothing new. As far back as 2019, fully 92% of all foreign exchange trading was done by algorithms rather than humans. For stock trading, the percentage is lower, but…
There are a range of security concerns associated with large language models (LLMs), which are the basis of popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. For one thing, the chatbots themselves are vulnerable to malicious prompts from anyone who interacts with them. Such “prompt injection” attacks can cause LLMs to behave in…
Plagiarism, presenting someone else’s words, ideas, or work as your own without giving proper credit to the source, is not new. The term was coined by the poet Martial in ancient Rome, around 80 AD. However, it has taken on a new lease of life with the widespread use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) based…
Imagine giving a robot a multiple-choice exam, but then realising it already knows all the answers. When a new version of an AI model is released by a major vendor like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, it usually comes with a series of statements about how well the model performs on benchmark tests. These benchmarks may…