The following is an excerpt from an article written by Rajul Rana published on Forbes.com.
Every decade or so, a technology comes along and disrupts everything around us. It changes the way we work, the way we play and the way we engage customers. In the ’80s, the personal computer revolutionized our world, then the internet in the ’90s, smartphones in the 2000s and cloud computing in the 2010s. Now, we are on the brink of another significant technological transformation driven by generative AI (GenAI).
AI has been around for decades. So, why is there a sudden buzz around GenAI?
This surge can be attributed to a confluence of factors coming together in the past two years. Advances in raw computing power, the exponential growth in available data, plummeting AI training costs and breakthroughs in machine learning algorithms, such as the transformer model, now deliver unparalleled sophistication. OpenAI was quick to harness these trends; they wrapped the technology in an approachable interface and created a killer app that started the revolution and has gained millions of users since its launch.
Foundational Models
GenAI is based on foundation models (FM) that allow it to understand context and relevance within the content it processes, making it incredibly powerful and versatile. The transformer architecture represents a paradigm shift in how AI processes text, offering unprecedented language understanding.
Building FMs involves two key stages: unsupervised training on vast amounts of content (text, images, etc.) and fine-tuning for specific tasks, such as Q&As. The process is complex and resource-intensive. Selecting what FM to use is the first step in building a GenAI solution.
Read the full article here.
