AI Models : a Primer

Last updated: July 2, 2024

AI is as hot right now as the web was in the Dot com boom in the 90s, when buzzwords such as e-commerce and SEO were hot off the press.. Keeping up with advancements of AI right now is like drinking from the proverbial firehose.

Over the past decade we’ve seen some major trends in tech, and the job market has reflected these trends. As storage has increased and costs have come down, accompanied by advancements in processing power, we’ve unlocked the ability to work with massive amounts of data. First we had Big Data, then Machine Learning and now we’re hot for Artificial Intelligence. GPTs (Generative pre-trained transformers) are neural networks and a type of large language models (LLMs) leveraging natural language processing to power Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). They are trained on large data sets and designed to evaluate input and generate output (text, images, audio, video, 3d, etc) from prompts and a variety of other inputs. GenAI, while controversial in some areas, is a transformative productivity tool, unlocking the ability to prototype and create content in lightning speed. These AI tools can be used to build chatbots, summarize long-form text, provide academic support, generate social media content, stylize content, data analysis, image analysis, image creation, animating images, creating memes, generate quizzes, coding assistance /websites, blog posts, travel plans and more. While GenAI can outperform human speed capabilities, it still requires human intervention from crafting the perfect prompt to final edits. It’s not perfect. I quote a speaker from AWE XR ’24 “AI is not generative, it is derivative”. It still requires human creativity, human input, and most importantly, human context. It is great for prototyping and quickly analyzing information.

GenAI Overview

Whether you are looking for a model or an application that leverages LLMs, it helps to understand the various tools available in the AI Tech Stack. Here’s a good source for finding some tools for your use case: TopAI Tools . I also hopped over to eWeek for news and updates and found a ranking of the top 150 AI tools.

Play with AI models

You can access most of the models below natively from their organization or in APIs, or you can use a number of cloud solutions providers such as AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud, Microsoft, etc.

• Kaggle for over 350k public data sets and over 1M public notebooks.
• Hugging Face