Tony is a Geek

 ever wondered what goes in INSIDE a Large Language Model (LLM)? Back in the "day" LOL okay, a couple of years ago, this was mapped out and us early adopters had this worked out mostly on paper - but this is so cool to see / zoom in & out and trace through what is happening at each step of the way through an LLM to get from initial prompt through to output: https://bbycroft.net/llm If you press [SPACE] you can step through in a guided tour: This is really useful & potentially helpful for people to understand what happens behind the Wizard of Oz curtain

Well, this is a turn up for the books and something long overdue for the general public: find out more here: https://opal.withgoogle.com/landing/ Now, you could just go off and do some gold-rush effort and I highly encourage you to do so - THIS is a game-changer.  It really is. As this is "my universe", I'm just going to pull it back to me (yes, very narcissistic, I know, but I don't care).  Here are a couple of articles that I just want to call attention to: https://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/2020/02/a-week-off-worksort-ofproject-o.html https://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/2020/12/project-o-my-machine-programming-project.html The basic premise was to use NLP (natural language processing) where you, as a non-technical person, could describe what you want an application to be and do.  Then, through the power of automation it would generate a starter-for-10 application from templated code and deploy it onto a Cloud environment, so that you could then see it / touch it / run i...

 Wow! just wow. I was using this sort of kit about 2 years ago for the nice sum of around £2,500 You can now get it between £350-£650 (depending on where you buy it from), or $249 (yeah, I'll let you work out that conversation rate chaos?!?!) What does it do? It is a wow! show-stopper.  CHECK IT OUT CHECK IT OUT MORE HERE: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-systems/jetson-orin/nano-super-developer-kit/ Okay, I'll stop teasing & show you the SPECs: YES, you read that right, 1024 CUDA cores.... 1024.... in something that small.  Now, it starts to become something useful?!?! CHECK OUT the official 1-pager of info: https://nvdam.widen.net/s/zkfqjmtds2/jetson-orin-datasheet-nano-developer-kit-3575392-r2 I'd love to order one.  However, life unfortunately gets in the way, so I have to stick with paying bills first & such innovative advancements have to pass me by (for now). OKAY, so after checking this out - a DIRECT sale, I was a little surp...

Google has literally let the genie out of the bottle: https://sites.google.com/view/genie-2024 " We introduce Genie, the first generative interactive environment trained in an unsupervised manner from unlabelled Internet videos. The model can be prompted to generate an endless variety of action-controllable virtual worlds described through text, synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches. At 11B parameters, Genie can be considered a foundation world model. It is comprised of a spatiotemporal video tokenizer, an autoregressive dynamics model, and a simple and scalable latent action model.  Genie enables users to act in the generated environments on a frame-by-frame basis despite training without any ground-truth action labels or other domain-specific requirements typically found in the world model literature. Further the resulting learned latent action space facilitates training agents to imitate behaviors from unseen videos, opening the path for training generalist agents of...

I have been asked by more than a few people about my views on A.I. ( which does NOT exist btw - there is no Artificial Intelligence, it does not exist yet, get over it ) and what I've been doing with it in relation to my work/work.  Well, I cannot tell you that, obviously. I have though in the past, populated articles on this site that reflect things that I have been doing / investigating for work/work and have made a record of them so that if/when I wish to repeat them I can return here and follow my instructions OR I have posted 'items of interest', things that I think might be interesting to follow up on at a near date/time in the future. I steer away from all the ChatGPT or Generative AI ( again, pi$$ poor name ) hype-b*ll*x that has been spewing out from very ignorant and naive people over the past 6-months.  Most of them should know better, as to the rest, well, they are the clueless one's, no change there, and they are just focused on the money $$$$ side of thin...

 what is real & what is hype? very good article to reset the ground truth.......  https://blogs.gartner.com/anthony_bradley/2022/02/08/what-is-ai-really-looking-behind-the-hype/ some very valid & well thought out points that I totally agree with. A.I. = X Artificial intelligence is a computer program that accepts inputs and infers desired outputs using rules-based or statistics-based algorithms. M.L. = Machine Learning More accurately, machine learning is a computer program based on mathematical algorithms that use an example data set to determine the variable input parameters that deliver a desired output Artificial Neural Networks In business terms, neural networks are computer programs that break big problems into small pieces and aggregate the results to find an acceptable solution. Model Training In business terms, model training is using numerous examples of a desired result, most often in the form of large data sets, to build a mathematical model that can m...

 Yep, it's finally happening.  The "need" to have PhD, Master degree'd geeky / expensive mathematical statistical analysts to do your Machine Learning models looks to be fading away. Okay, so the reality is it won't happen overnight.  It will happen though, slowly at first and then as these products mature further, we'll end up with a lego-brick concept of plug-and-play Machine Learning modules that will get used / re-used as needed.  All without the need for the geeky glasses and white coats. https://www.udemy.com/course/no-code-machine-learning/ The above course takes you through using products from a couple of the BIG IT companies: Build Powerful Machine Learning Models w/Zero Coding!  Master Google Vertex AI, Microsoft Azure ML Designer, & DataRobot Now, this is something that I'm very keen to see progress and improve. Of course I've signed up to the course and yes, it is out of my own pocket and no, I don't get any kick back for promoting ...

 I am often baffled by the external perception ( ie. people who don't work with this stuff everyday ) that is portrayed about A.I.. I also have issue with the usage of the term A.I. - as far as I am aware, we / humans, have not yet successfully created an Artificial Intelligence.  We have created human children, that have somewhat of a limited intelligence, but we have absolutely and genuinely no idea "how" we created the childs intelligence, that is a mystery.  Before, b!tching at me that we are the all knowing masters of the planet Earth and we are far superior, we have scientists and we know how everything works.... we don't. fact.  We can sit down with pen & paper in my garage and draw out exactly how the cars in my garage work.  We can pick any piece, strip it down, figure it out & rebuild it.  Because we have an understanding, we potentially can even improve certain elements, such as carbs or fuel injection manifolds. However, we ( mad scienti...

....and other grouchy grumblings from an old IT guy :-D Okay, first I'll say, I've been knocking around with IT since the early days, yes, yes, yes, that means I'm biased, IT racist (if you will) and very set in my ways about how things should and should not work with IT..... in fact, I'm not.  I'm actually quite the opposite.  I'm very flexible and open-minded.  That's how I've managed to stay relevant over the past 25+ years.  I've evolved with IT......where it makes sense. I've been cautious when I needed to, I've thrown caution to the wind on the odd occasion and just went with the flow to see where we'd end up. However.  All this new nonsense about A.I (Artificial Intelligence) and the term "Data Scientist" as a job role just rubs salt into a paper cut for me. 1st you are not a scientist.  yes, okay, you probably were very good as maths (correct spelling) and statistics at school, did that weird class you could d...

Okay, no monarchs have died and I'm not a king nor do I work for one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_king_is_dead,_long_live_the_king! but, I've officially moved around within IBM...again.  Well, IBM is big enough to have such a vast array of interesting things going on that you really don't need to leave it and work for other companies to get access to more interesting technologies. So what am I doing?  Well....the same as I have been for the past 5-6 years!  But this time, I'm not the geeky specialist kept in a basement ( or customers basement ) working on things that I cannot tell you about.  I'm now being brought out into the light, working for GBS ( shock!horror! as far back as anyone can remember, no Lab Services employee has EVER moved from Lab Services to GBS before, ever...I like a challenge! ).  Therefore, I'm going to have to get more exposure to the outside world and the outside world is going to get more exposure to me. Most people know...

So, after having a bit of an issue a few weeks back concerning my own hearing, I started to look into the technology of "old people".  Well, that's a bit of a stereotype, it's not just old people who need hearing aids, it's all ranges of people.  It wasn't until I suffered from temporary hearing loss, that I really appreciated the value of hearing.  Sound a bit odd that, but try it someday.  I don't mean just sticking your fingers in your ears for a bit, or shoving earplugs in, that's not the same as "no sound".  It's freaky.  anyway, it got me thinking.  If my hearing does deteriorate in the near future, what am I going to do about it? I've seen the usual big hearing aids that you clip on your ears and have a little bud that you plug in, these apparently are very good, but very expensive and they have trouble focusing... I mean that in the sense that, if you have a person talking to you in front of you and a car drives past, the he...

A great article on what I see as the "Next step....." https://sdtimes.com/ibm-expands-ai-research-support-aging-population/ “For the first time ever, there are more people over 65 than under 5,” Keohane said. “There is essentially a shortage of care providers. If you look at this demographic shift across the globe, this is why a company like IBM is interested in looking at aging. What does the aging demographic shift mean for our clients? We’re in every industry and every one will be impacted.” By combining IBM’s IoT and health care research with their Watson machine learning, Keohane says that the effect this shift will have can be broken down in such a way that it will benefit everyone from the elderly in need of improved care to businesses, now more aware of their customer base. “Aging isn’t a disease,” Keohane said. “We’re all doing it. But it does have impact on health. So could we surround ourselves with emerging technology in the home, while ...