Theme 1

Using generative AIs – Strengths and weaknesses

Artificial intelligence has been around for several decades and is a broad science, encompassing symbolic reasoning methods and machine learning techniques. These latter, encompassing classification problems and generative problems, has benefited in recent years from advances in computer hardware to perform intense parallel calculations on very large volumes of data. This allowed data scientists to imagine and experiment with new methods and approach new areas. The latest generative AIs work remarkably well, beyond even their designers’ expectations, without anyone seeming to really understand why they work so well. They are now available to the general public and can be used for a wide variety of use cases, and sometimes for tasks that were previously reserved for humans.

This situation raises a number of questions.

  1. These AIs learn based on data produced by humans, which also includes their bad side, their biases, their excesses. We will then talk about AIs which are themselves biased, which hallucinate, which lie. How to have confidence?

  2. These AIs require huge amounts of training data. There are few players capable of collecting, storing and processing these quantities, while everyone would like to benefit from AI services. How much of a problem is this? What would be the next step?

  3. These AIs are used for tasks that seemed reserved for human skills (art, humor, etc.) Is it already working? Soon? Never?

  4. Since these machines have the ability to learn, does man still need to learn? What impact on education?

Documentation

Tips for fast & efficient reading

The documentation on offer can be extensive, long and complex. Don’t panic. We can’t hope to have time and expertize to examine each article in detail during the session.

The body of a scientific article is made up of arguments, demonstrations and proofs, which is mandatory for other scientists, but perhaps not for the general public. This is why an Abstract is provided. It gives a general idea of the subject and the findings. That’s enough for a first reading level. (A second reading level will focus on the Introduction and Conclusion sections. And a third will delve into the body of the article.)

So, organize your reading time to cover the diversity of documents, without trying to go into too much detail in each one.