AI for Faculty and Staff: General AI Information

Building an Artificial Intelligence: 

• Chatbot 

  • “A chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation with an end user. Not all chatbots are equipped with artificial intelligence (AI), but modern chatbots increasingly use conversational AI techniques such as natural language processing (NLP) to understand user questions and automate responses to them.” - IBM 

• Generative AI 

  • “Generative AI refers to deep-learning models that can generate high-quality text, images, and other content based on the data they were trained on.” - IBM 

• Machine Learning (ML) 

  • “Machine learning (ML) is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) and computer science that focuses on the using data and algorithms to enable AI to imitate the way that humans learn, gradually improving its accuracy.” - IBM 

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) 

  • “Natural language processing, or NLP, combines computational linguistics—rule-based modeling of human language—with statistical and machine learning models to enable computers and digital devices to recognize, understand and generate text and speech.” - IBM 

• Large Language Model (LLM) 

  • “Large language models (LLMs) are a category of foundation models trained on immense amounts of data making them capable of understanding and generating natural language and other types of content to perform a wide range of tasks.” - IBM 

• Small Language Model (SLM)

  • "A small language model applies the same methodology [as a LLM] but goes a step further to tackle domain-specific data and domain-specific use cases" Tech Target

Using Large Language Models 

• Hallucination 

  • “AI hallucination is a phenomenon wherein a large language model (LLM)—often a generative AI chatbot or computer vision tool—perceives patterns or objects that are nonexistent or imperceptible to human observers, creating outputs that are nonsensical or altogether inaccurate”. - IBM 

• Prompt 

  • “An artificial intelligence (AI) prompt is a mode of interaction between a human and a large language model that lets the model generate the intended output. This interaction can be in the form of a question, text, code snippets or examples.” - Tech Target 

• Prompt Engineering 

  • “Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems are designed to generate specific outputs based on the quality of provided prompts. Prompt engineering helps generative AI models better comprehend and respond to a wide range of queries, from the simple to the highly technical.” - IBM 

Understanding Large Language Models (LLMs) 

• Parameters 

  • “Parameters are a machine learning term for the variables present in the model on which it was trained that can be used to infer new content”. “... LLM typically has at least one billion or more parameters”. - TechTarget 

• Tokens 

  • “Tokens are fundamental building blocks in the world of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs)...Essentially, tokens are the pieces of text that language models read and analyze. They serve as the primary input data that these models use to perform tasks ranging from text classification to language generation” - Medium. 

• Training Data 

  • “AI training data is a set of labeled examples that is used to train machine learning models. The data can take various forms, such as images, audio, text, or structured data, and each example is associated with an output label or annotation that describes what the data represents or how it should be classified. Training data is used to teach machine learning algorithms to recognize patterns and make predictions. By feeding a large amount of data with known labels into a machine learning algorithm, the algorithm can learn to recognize patterns and make predictions about new, unseen data.” - TranscribeMe!