Developing AI Intuition: From Model Basics to Chat GPT

The recent speed of breadth of AI adoption is breathtaking. Engineers and scientists widely recognize the opportunity to accelerate research and build new software systems using machine learning, but what does a researcher need to know? This talk attempts to build an intuitive understanding of AI methods up from fundamentals, to applications in natural language, audio, and video understanding and generation. Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, have emerged in the past few years to offer particularly striking new capability but also open up potentially pitfalls in data hallucination, bias, and abuse. The talk is illustrated with a series of practical AI solutions from the world of team communication and collaboration.