Welcome to Lesson 1 of the How to Succeed with AI free course.
I’m Dave Waring, your instructor, and the co-creator of BrainDrive.ai.
In this lesson I’m going to teach you everything you need to know about how AI works, regardless of technical ability. And I am going to do it in less than 5 minutes.
Ready? Let’s jump in.
AI Model vs. AI System
Most people think products like ChatGPT are AI. But that’s not actually true. ChatGPT is a product that allows you to interact with AI.
Think about it this way. Have you ever used electricity? Good.
The AI model is like electricity, and the system is like the appliance that electricity powers. It’s just with AI, the model is intelligence, and the system is the product that you connect to that intelligence to make it useful.
This is the most important thing to understand about AI, so let’s make sure we’ve got it:
Products like ChatGPT are made up of 2 things:
1. The AI Model — This is the intelligence that everyone is so excited about.
2. The System — This is what makes the AI model useful.
The AI model adds intelligence to systems like ChatGPT, like electricity adds power to appliances like the refrigerator.
For the AI model, the name tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Do you know what intelligence is? Great. This is the artificial version of it.
If you want to start building AI models, then you need to know a lot more than that. Just like if you want to start building power plants, you need to know a lot more than you do about electricity.
But if you want to use AI successfully, you don’t need to know any more about AI than you do about electricity to turn on a lamp.
AI is artificial intelligence. It powers AI systems with intelligence just like electricity powers a lamp.
Now for the system.
It’s not that complicated either.
But as with a lamp, you do need to know a few things - like how to plug it in, turn it on, and change the bulb - in order to use it successfully.
The Four Parts of Every AI System
Every AI system like ChatGPT is made up of the same four parts:
1. The Interface — This is how you talk to the AI model. With ChatGPT, this is the chat interface you see when you login.
2. The Memory — What the system knows about you. Does it remember your goals, your preferences, your situation from previous conversations? If it does then the AI system you are using has memory. If you start from scratch each time it does not.
3. The Hosting — Where your AI system lives, and who controls it. This determines who has access to your data, and whether you can take your AI system with you if you leave.
4. The Connections & Tools — How the system reaches and interacts with the outside world on your behalf. Can it send an email? Browse a website? Check your calendar? Connections and tools are the difference between an AI that talks and an AI that does. When you hear people talk about AI agents, this is what they are talking about.
What’s Next
Congratulations! You now know all the basics of AI systems, and more than 95% of people I talk to about AI.
But here’s the surprising thing. The most important thing is not the AI model (even though that’s what everyone talks about).
Succeeding with AI is all about what the AI system knows about you, the Memory component we learned about above.
How you build the memory determines what the AI knows about you, and how well it can help you.
And that’s what we are going to learn about in the next lesson. I’ll see you there!