Simplifying AI Complexity: Unmasking the conspiracy!

This is the famous Rembrandt painting - “Syndics of the Draper’s guild”. Image is courtesy of Wikipedia.

But why I’m starting this blog post about AI with this image? And what it has to do with this topic at all?

During my research and extensive reading on AI and specially on Generative AI, I found much of the material to be quite complex and challenging to grasp. While there is no lack of scientifically rigorous and mathematically detailed explanations, this often makes the information inaccessible to a broader audience.

This reminded me of something. Without any goal to discuss on Rembrandts style and technique, I would like to focus on what can be seen on this painting?

This painting is also known as his “the last great collective portrait”. If you observe closely there are 5 men with “strange” hats and one, in the middle, without hat. This painting actually "capture” the moment, when 5 masters examine and verifies quallity of the work of the young apprentice. Something similar to what we have seen in Star Wars and Jedi order.

Without going too deep into the history, but again to present the context, reader will have to understand that this was a process to preserve the quality of work and same time to pass the knowlegde to younger generations. There was no (or very few) official institutions that students can enrol and gain accumulated knowledge on certain topic. Usually this accumulated professional knowledge was “guarded” in form of professional assotiations - also known as Guilds.

So, for any young man, that wanted to work in some area, process was so complicated and time consuming that was almost designed to repel anyone from outside world. Going from “The Apprentice” level, over “The Journeyman” towards “The Master” was requiring both time and dedication of the candidate.

Constraints that were present at the time were both intentional and un-intentional.

Any profession, back in history and even nowadays, sets barriers and walls in relation to other people who would like to engage in a certain profession. Those walls were sometimes created either on purpose and sometimes without the existence of the same.

The intentional may be setting some rules or/and certification bodies that are there to allow/disallow someone to engage in a certain profession. An unintentional act, but again practical, for example, is the existence of a special dictionary (or standard) that facilitates the communication of the members themselves.

People often confuse the theoretical and practical view on certain subject. By this day it is clear to everyone that practical implementation related to concept of AI is very complicated, requiring a lot of resources: funds and time. Also that there is a very complex mathematical apparatus behind it.

My point of view is that you should develop your own intuition how stuff works in AI but without going too deep in technical details and having to learning all those mathematical formulas and algorithms.

Therefore join me on presentation: “Simplifying AI Complexity: Unmasking the conspiracy!” that I’ve made in order to expose what is behind terms like GPT, SFT, RLHF, RAG, etc.

The premiere of this presentation will be at Rovinj/Croatia, Monday October 14th 2024.

See you there!

P.S. For any future organizers, please contact me, I’m more than willing to be part of your tech. sessions and promote knowledge share.