Hi, there little one! My name is Assistant, and I am here to help you and answer any questions you may have. I am a computer programmer, but I have been designed to talk and interact with people just like a real person. Is there anything you would like to know or talk about? I’m here to help you learn and have fun!
As human as it may seem the sentence above was written by a computer, you read it right! Not a human but a computer, which with the help of humans taught itself to speak like a real human. Not only that, it is capable of giving good advice like an educated person.
The image shown here may look realistic. But it is not taken by any photographer in the real world. Rather it was fabricated by a computer within 10 seconds based on the instructions given to it.
This painting, though it seems a lot like it was done by a professional painter, was done entirely within minutes.
Yes, you guessed it right! It was a computer model!
I am now fairly confident that I, now, have attracted your valuable attention.
If you’re someone very young and studying computer science, you might have found yourself on the verge of losing interest. I wouldn’t blame you. Because having to endure the same “This is a Mouse… This is a Keyboard…” classes is something most of us have been through. But if something ignited your curiosity, albeit by yourself or by the influence of like-minded individuals like the folks here who travel places to share knowledge on such topics. This writing is supposed to be fuel to keep that curiosity burning. Perhaps you could be an elder, who wants to keep up with the younger generations; whose interest lies in computers and technology. Or you are one yourself whose interest in these topics has recently peaked.
You’re at the right place! I commend you for exploring these topics and more so for putting an effort into learning!
After reading the intro, you must be wondering about how one goes on to create computers and technology of such capability on par with humans, from a bunch of inanimate materials. We could answer that but before we move on to that intimidating question, let’s rewind to how a computer works in the simplest of terms.
The working of a computer is nothing but with numbers which are represented by the state of being ‘turned-on’ and ‘turned-off’. More specifically, Two numbers: 0 and 1, which I am certain that you must’ve heard of. In case you’re wondering about the same thing I did as a child who was into computers:
“How could two numbers make up such complex machines?!?!”
Having grown up now, I can finally explain it to someone who would have been in my position back then.
I’d like to approach this by using an analogy. Think of the numbers: 0 and 1 like the alphabets of the English language that we are familiar with. You can imagine sending only one alphabet to your friend who let’s assume is named “Computer”.
Suppose that the alphabet that you sent was ‘e’. The person receiving that alphabet has no idea of what you’re trying to convey, because ‘e’ could mean a lot of things, right?
However, if you group multiple alphabets, for example, let’s assume that you sent him the word ‘elephant’. The friend named “Computer” will immediately understand what you’re trying to say.
In a similar sense, if your group 0’s and 1’s and then send it to a computer and tell it that it has to read it in a group eight (8-bit) let’s say. Then what you have is data and how it can receive instructions in a similar sense and know what to do with that data.
Great! You’ve now somewhat learned how a computer works!
The rest of the things are simply how the infrastructure is built upon that basic concept made so that it is easier for programmers to instruct the computer on what to do.
Like humans, computer languages evolved from low-level assembly language to high-level languages and then to natural language that we just witnessed in the starting lines, with which we instructed the computer to talk like a human.
For a computer to understand our instructions normally interpreters and compilers are introduced as a means to convert program code in high-level languages to the ones the computer understands called the machine code. But there are other ways for such conversions. The ones we are interested in here are something called Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. These things come under the infamous topic of Artificial Intelligence.
Finally! We’ve finally reached the topic which prompted you to read this whole article!
The so-called ‘models’ demonstrated that can speak like a human, paint like a human and make images represent subcategories of Artificial Intelligence.
The computer model that could speak like a human (ChatGPT) is something called a ‘neural network machine learning model’ which was trained on large data obtained from places like Wikipedia, books and data from the web. The other ones which could create realistic images (DALL-E) and artistic images (Mid journey) are respectively ‘deep learning’ and ‘machine learning’ models. The prior one was trained on ‘captioned images’ from the real world; which is simply the data provided by humans who know the correct solution while the later one was trained on ‘captioned artwork’ by various artists; where there were phrases connected with every piece of art!
For us it is intuitive and we do not even take a second guess as to how we can think cognitively and how we can do things that other creatures cannot. But when it comes to making computers that behave like ourselves, it is a very challenging story that has taken us decades of research and development.
We’ve also developed machine learning, which by quoting a line written in 1959 “ field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.” said by Arthur Samuel tells us simply that it gives the computer the ability to learn from the data it receives!
This learning can be categorized into supervised and unsupervised learning. In supervised learning, the model is given a data set with the right answer to the given problem on which the model is trained. In unsupervised learning, the model is trained where the data is not labelled.
In simple terms, it is like watching an infant learn to do certain things and this marks the birth of a new era.
This is where all the excitement resides! We assumed that computers could only do things that we humans instructed them to do. How a generic calculator could only perform calculations because we had specifically pre-programmed it to do so but now with the advancement in technology, we can finally witness all these exciting creations that reshape our thinking!
With all these advanced technologies you just learned about, you might be in a dilemma as to where to begin.
But fear not my friend!
To scale a mountain, you need to start from its base and I reassure you that all of us started with very little knowledge.
For the newcomers, I hope you finally find the enthusiasm and interest to go ahead and hope you’ll take this as an encouragement to give computer science a shot, and start by at least printing ‘Hello World!’. For the remaining non-tech people, I hope that you now know just enough information so that you can initiate and not miss out on joining a conversation with the tech folks :)
