AI and Machine Learning Notes
I have been active in the broad field of artificial intelligence for many years. I first learned about simple neural networks (perceptrons) back in the 1970s. In the late 1980s, I studied expert systems a little; and since the early 2000's, I've been a member of the Maxima development team, with computer algebra systems (CAS) like Maxima being of course at the forefront of procedural machine intelligence for many decades. (Maxima, and its predecessor, MACSYMA, have roots dating back to the 1960s.)
More recently, I have spent a fair bit of time dealing with machine learning solutions, both small and large. Small meaning bespoke neural nets to analyze data sets such as the MIMIC database of emergency room patients; and large, of course, mostly means large language and multimodal models, including not just the one everyone knows, ChatGPT, but its smaller and more diverse cousins, including capable models that are compact and efficient enough to run reliably on consumer-grade hardware and produce good results.