Two and a half years ago I was one of the earliest users of ChatGPT, and like most others I was amazed at what it could do, but right away I started dreaming up potential use cases that it was in no way ready to support. As I started testing ideas, the top of my wishlist read, “Run an LLM at home.” Not for any particular reason at the time, other than my love of self-hosting anything I could reasonably run locally. ...
AI is making my life very difficult these days. And no, this isn’t a rant about AI taking jobs; I’m talking about the Artifical Intelligence class I’m taking in school this semester. The class itself is very interesting, and the approach our professor takes in teaching is quite challenging, something that until now I’ve felt was largely lacking in other classes. On day 1 of the class we were given an assignment due in two weeks to come up with a topic of interest in AI research and learn enough about it to write a formal research proposal. The proposal had to include a description of some problem within an area of AI and the state of research into that issue, and a plan for improving upon existing research with a novel approach to solving the problem. (I’ll talk more about that project another time.) ...
It’s no secret that digital assistants in 2023 are clunky and stale. Siri has lost its edge, while Alexa and Google Assistant were thrown at every wall to see where they might stick. Each of them responds to a limited set of instructions, making them only as useful as the number of commands one can memorize. While it’s clear that generative AI and digital assistants will converge at some point, I’m too eager to wait. ...