Understanding AI and the Basics of Language Models
Overview
This lesson is for learners who are completely new to AI. You will understand:
- What Artificial Intelligence (AI) is
- How AI “thinks” and makes decisions
- The concept of intelligent agents
- The idea of language models, which are the foundation for AI text applications
- How we interact with AI using inputs (later called prompts)
By the end of this lesson, you’ll have a solid understanding of what AI is and how it works at a fundamental level.
💡 Key Concepts
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): Machines performing tasks that usually require human intelligence, such as understanding text, recognizing images, or solving problems.
- Intelligent Agent: Anything (software or robot) that perceives its environment and takes actions to achieve a goal.
- Environment: The world the agent interacts with (real or virtual).
- Percepts & Actions: Inputs the agent sees and the actions it performs.
- Language Model: A type of AI that predicts text, such as what word comes next in a sentence.
🧠 Concept Explanation
1. What is AI?
AI is the science of teaching machines to think and act like humans.
Examples in everyday life:
- Voice assistants (Siri, Alexa) understand and respond to spoken questions.
- Recommendation engines (YouTube, Netflix) suggest videos or movies based on your past behavior.
- Self-driving cars detect obstacles and navigate traffic.
AI is about making machines “intelligent”: able to perceive, reason, learn, and act.
2. Intelligent Agents
An agent is anything that can act in an environment to achieve a goal.
Key elements:
- Sensors: How the agent perceives the environment (camera, text input).
- Actuators: How the agent interacts with the environment (moving a robot, generating text).
- Rationality: The agent acts in a way that maximizes its chances of achieving a goal.
Example:
- A thermostat senses temperature (sensor) and turns the heater on/off (actuator) to keep the room at a comfortable temperature.
- A chatbot reads your text (sensor) and responds with an answer (actuator) to satisfy your query.
3. What is a Language Model?
A language model is a special type of AI that understands and generates text.
- It predicts the next word in a sequence based on the words that came before.
- Think of it as a very smart autocomplete system: it predicts the most likely next word to form coherent sentences.
- Language models power tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard, and code assistants.
Simple Example:
Input: "The sun rises in the"
Output: "east"
- The model predicted the next word based on patterns it learned from reading a lot of text.
Language models do not “think” like humans; they learn patterns from text to predict sequences of words.
4. How We Interact with AI
Even without coding, you interact with AI by giving it inputs, which are instructions, questions, or text. These inputs guide the AI to generate the output you want. Later, we will call these inputs “prompts”.
Example:
- Input: “Explain photosynthesis in simple terms.”
- AI Output: “Photosynthesis is the process plants use to turn sunlight into food.”
🧩 Beginner Examples
- Text Prediction
Input: "I like to drink coffee in the"
AI Output: "morning" or "afternoon"
Explanation: AI predicts the most likely next word.
- Question Answering
Input: "Who was the first president of the USA?"
AI Output: "George Washington"
- Simple Conversation
Input: "Hello, how are you?"
AI Output: "I’m an AI, I don’t have feelings, but I can help you with questions!"
⚙️ Tools for Absolute Beginners
- ChatGPT / OpenAI Playground: Type any question or sentence and see AI respond.
- Google Bard or Gemini Chat: Another beginner-friendly platform to explore AI text.
- No programming required at this stage—just type and observe how AI responds.
🧭 Step-by-Step Beginner Activity
- Go to ChatGPT or another AI chat platform.
- Type a simple question, e.g., “What is AI?”
- Observe the output.
- Try a follow-up question, e.g., “Explain it like I’m 10 years old.”
- Notice how changing the wording changes the answer.
📝 Exercises
- Ask the AI to define three things: AI, intelligent agent, and environment.
- Predict the next word in a sentence: “The cat climbed onto the…”
- Start a simple conversation with AI: “Tell me a joke about robots.”
🔍 Summary & Key Takeaways
- AI enables machines to perform tasks requiring human intelligence.
- Intelligent agents perceive, act, and aim to achieve goals in their environment.
- Language models predict text sequences based on patterns learned from vast datasets.
- You interact with AI by giving it instructions (inputs), which the AI uses to generate outputs.
- This lesson lays the foundation for learning prompt engineering, the next step in guiding AI effectively.