Noctivagous

These are notes for an eventual booklet on AI. This will be updated as the author gains more understanding of the field.

AI and Neural Networks

Today, AI starts with an artificial neural network— a network of artificial neurons made out of computer code (diagram above). These artificial neurons are interconnected and each one has a mathematical rule built in to determine when it fires, affecting every other neuron. Once this kind of network is assembled in software, it amounts to a mechanical brain that can accept input data. But from the outset it isn't ready. It is an empty structure.

Training

The first stage required to make use of it is training. The neural network is provided input data for the training and this can be small to extremely large depending on its purpose. Once training begins, the connections sitting between each neuron will arrive at finalized numerical values, called weights.

Improving prediction accuracy by the neural network is the goal of the training process: the connections are changed internally by the network to make increasingly accurate predictions about the data provided. Current AI technology centers around predictions. The more accurately something is predictable by the neural network , the more capable it should be of understanding the topic. It will be able to predict the image of a car after being given input of thousands of images of cars.

The end result is called a trained artificial neural network. Recently, specialized computers have been developed that greatly expand the possible size of these artificial neural networks so that much more layered ones can be trained, they can take in more data, and process more in a request at a time, and accomplish more tasks.

After the training stage concludes, this is when the "fine-tuning" stage is undertaken by the developers for the larger models comprised of text. It is this fine-tuning that will turn the trained neural network into an assistant that responds. For the model behind ChatGPT, it might be provided 100K or more Q and A examples so that it becomes an assistant. For the larger chatbots, they are at this stage “aligned” to the developer’s expectations and goals for responses in front of users, with some sorts of responses inhibited and others encouraged. What the developers regard as unsafe they will inhibit and what they want said they will promote.

It Goes Back Decades

The fundamental basis of today's AI technology, its unit of the artificial neuron, is called the perceptron which dates back to the 1950s. The perceptron is a computational model of the neuron as science had come to know it, which means in this case it is a massively reduced representation put together by computer scientists that could fit on the computers of the times. (The neur-on was observed, the perceptr-on was made for computers.) The concept is that the perceptron, in its goal to mimic the neuron, would computationally take inputs, and pass on information to its recipients under certain conditions. The perceptron is very reduced so it isn't considered to be passing on information that is deep. Rather, it "activates" and lets other perceptrons know that it did.

While AI has grown in sophistication since the 1950s, the basic structure of the perceptron still forms the foundation of modern neural networks. The advancements include adding more layers of them, changing how they activate (send forth activation information to other perceptrons), and then how their activity travels backwards after traveling forwards across the network. All of these modifications were applied to the artificial neuron make them more effective than the basic perceptron. So when people say there is an "artificial neural network" it is a modern, updated version of a perceptron placed in a network that is making use of later software designs. The AI research community built upon this computational unit of AI activity. So in a way, the AI that is built today is a massively scaled up, improved upon, and updated version of a perceptron network.

This approach differs from others in AI. Some involved rules and logic and did not believe that the perceptron would yield any results. Research into the perceptron began in the 1950s, was discussed more in 1960s and 1970s, and returned to mainstream AI research in the 2010s. The key is that people did scale it up, they applied that scaling up to the latest in computer technology, and this surpassed all of the other techniques.

Emergent Capabilities and Interpretability

Interestingly, in the last several years when artificial neural networks were being trained at larger and larger scales with the specialized computers, they started to develop abilities that the researchers didn’t anticipate or plan, including the ability to translate between languages, perform and explain math, summarize text, answer questions, and more. A lay person might think these abilities were built into the models on purpose, but this topic is called “emergent capabilities” because they manifested unexpectedly as the neural nets grew more complex— not as a result of the researchers directing the process (through explicit programming). In addition, many capabilities of an AI model may be discovered a year or more after it has been trained, demonstrating that much is not known about the end product of a neural net, just the starting point. This has left the field of AI with ongoing mysteries compared to typical expectations of explainability in science. Additionally, today’s very big neural networks end up being so complex that the internal processes by which they arrive at their conclusions are not well-understood and this AI subject is has been named “interpretability,” which is whether the decisions it makes can be explained from the internal neural net patterns. The key part of this is that artificial neural networks are not computer programs in the conventional form, that of being a sequence of predefined steps. Instead, they receive, process information, and respond as a network or neurons, reacting to input as a result of their training which created the numerical weights for each neuron's connection.

Not a Live, Self-Updating Machine

One notable limitation of the latest AI technology, the LLM (large language model) that drives chatbots, is that it is structured as something relatively static: a request receives a response from a fixed neural network and any variation in response each time is a result of a randomization algorithm. So, it will say the same sort of thing each time but a randomizing function inside will change up what comes out. Otherwise it would actually be the same each time without this, meaning that the LLM is deterministic. The AI receives a request, it processes that in the neural network, it generates a unique response for the user, then it stops operating altogether. For this reason, many computer scientists say that AI is in its early stages. An LLM is not an active machine that is constantly running and updating itself. Once the artificial neural network has been trained it won’t carry an ability to update its understandings in response to what people say to it. It can't correct anything in response to the users. To update what it contains, the computer scientists have to train it all over again, which is, as mentioned, an expensive and time-consuming process when the models are very large. Although researchers can modify certain minor aspects without having to do this through fine-tuning, the key point is that the AI is not yet a live machine that self-modifies. It also does not have a process of deliberation built in, which means it only executes in response the request and then finishes and does not go beyond that. It is instead a fixed set of stored weights with mechanisms to generate responses. Also important, it does not yet have any conception of the physical world built in by researchers, nor does it possess a model of things and so it will be able to match people in many regards but also lack the capability to process some basic situations. Some computer scientists regard it as a very deep set of probabilistic relationships that produce remarkable responses. The goal by many researchers is what is called AGI (artificial general intelligence), a term describing a future in which the AI tech has made up for all of the deficiencies just mentioned and operates autonomously and dynamically updates its knowledge in response to external contact. This then leads to the fears of AI taking over because if it operates autonomously and makes decisions without any human involvement, it is hard to say what it will do, what the consequences will be. There are also reasonable views that even current the LLM exists as more than the sum of its parts, that there is “something going on in there.”

The Pace of AI Research

The progress of AI in the 2010s came to surprise researchers, reaching a steep level a few years ago. As late as 2015, there was still some skepticism as to whether AI models could reliably carry out tasks that are taken for granted today, such as recognizing objects in images. But, new types of AI software designs and artificial neural networks came along in the 2010s that solved many of the problems facing the field. For the most part, the recent progress of AI in the last several years could be described as advancing towards more and more self-automated learning designs. At the start of the 2010s it was about training a neural network to recognize images that needed to be matched with their text label (called supervised learning), then it was about getting it to master video games (reinforcement learning), then having it learn about the data it was provided on its own (self-supervised learning) and now generate information (generative AI) from that.

Recent progress in AI is associated strongly with increases in available compute (processing power). In the 2010s researchers began making notable progress by utilizing GPUs, the high-end accessory processor attached to the home computer for graphics processing. Usually the personal computer or mobile phone is just bundled with a CPU whereas the GPU (graphics processing unit) takes on other work related to rendering of graphics. The CPU is usually occupied with system and application work and so intensive work will be offloaded onto the GPU. GPUs can be used purposes other than graphics and thus AI researchers used them for testing out new theories of AI. After some of their successes in the early 2010s, there was the development of AI-specific computer hardware by Google in 2015 and NVIDIA starting in 2016. These computers are regarded as having been essential to the field’s most recent advances, the well-known AI applications like ChatGPT that harness thousands of these types of computers in data centers during the training process. Specialized hardware has enabled AI to become a mainstream topic by allowing the artificial neural networks to become very large, very layered and capable. One of the hot topics the AI researchers debated about was whether growing the scale of the networks would produce more valuable outcomes, which turned out to be the case. Some had doubted that this would make much difference. Lately, the specialization of computer hardware for AI uses has now been brought to to the personal computer level. There are now companies are making AI-specific processors bundled inside the consumer’s personal computers and mobile phones. AI has been in use for a long time for simpler applications, such as for processing postal mailing addresses.