Today I’m starting something I care about a lot
When I first came into contact with AI a few years ago, I was blown away. Since then I’ve used it daily, and my curiosity and technical background have allowed me to explore its use in depth and take advantage of some of its most interesting capabilities.
A remark made in passing by a friend made me reflect: many things that seemed obvious to me are not at all obvious to most people.
So I decided to write a series of posts that together will form a short course to give an overview of the radical change we’re living through. The goal is to offer a solid introduction that answers these questions: what it is, what its capabilities and limits are, how to use it, what I need to know to avoid its pitfalls, and which AI is right for me.
Do we really need to know about AI?
In my view, we’re living through the biggest revolution in human history. It will have, and is already having, deep repercussions in every area, from the most philosophical to the most practical.
Is it a bubble? Is there a lot of hype around the topic? Probably yes, but if the pace of innovation keeps up like this, the effects that are slow to show up concretely today will be overwhelming, both positively and negatively.
In short: yes, we need to know about it. And in the sea of available information, I’ve tried to isolate the most useful parts, bringing them together into a coherent, practically oriented path.
We’ll learn that there are many types of artificial intelligence doing very different things. This course focuses on one type of artificial intelligence: LLMs, the AIs born to process text, which today are increasingly multimedia.
Do you need to become a technician to use it well?
No. And that’s the point. You don’t need to know how to build an engine to drive a car well: you need to know how it works, what its limits are, and what the risks are. It’s the same with AI. That’s exactly the goal of this course: to provide the information needed to know AI well enough to use it properly.
Then, as with a car, experience makes the difference: the more you use it, the more sensitivity you’ll develop to its limits and its potential.
Today, and I stress today, because things could be different in a not-too-distant future, AI used correctly is a formidable tool for empowerment. It doesn’t yet do things truly in our place, but it helps us do everything better and faster.
And yes, it can also make us dumber: like any tool, if used poorly it can do damage.
Course index
- The five levels of awareness in using AI
- What AI is
- Minimal glossary and comparison between LLMs
- Do LLMs have a personality?
- How an LLM is built
- The interface of an LLM
- Recurring limits in chat and how to handle them
- Building a work environment around the LLM (in progress)
- The other AIs: images, video, TTS, etc. (in progress)
- AI agents and code generation (in progress)
Where to find the course
The posts/chapters will be published on my personal Facebook profile, on The AI Lab Facebook page, and on my website the-ai-lab.net.
On the website you’ll also find other information:
- Timeline: what happened in AI and when, to help you get your bearings in a story that moves very fast.
- Figures: who some of the companies and key players in this revolution are.
- Use case system: practical, concrete examples of what you can do with it, organized by situation (in progress).
If you think this content might be useful to someone you know, pass the post along to them.
In the end I’ll gather all the posts, plus a few extra chapters, into a small book: available at cost price for production and shipping only. The posts, on the other hand, will all remain free.
To create this course, I combined my own experience with what I describe in Level 4 (see chapter 1), the level where AI helps build things like this series, for example. And no, I didn’t just click a little button and have the course make itself.
Criticism and corrections are welcome, as long as they’re backed by arguments. Insults, provocations, spam, political flame wars, and off-topic comments will be removed.