front matter
preface
Although I’ve written books about computers for decades, I never expected to live long enough to witness the rise of true artificial intelligence (AI). Since AI was released to the public in November 2022, I’ve spent several hours a day exploring all the major AI systems.
I’ve covered the waterfront in this book, using Not Diamond (www.notdiamond.ai) for its multi-AI system facilities, Midjourney to create art, Claude for large data input and output (and lately for its several best-in-class abilities), GPT for strong general-purpose skills, reasoning, and the ability to converse in a convincing audio voice, Perplexity and Gemini for real-time web searching, and several others, including Copilot, Meta, Llama, DALL-E, Photoshop, and ChatHub.
AI is unique among human inventions in several ways. For one thing, it far surpasses previous inventions in its unparalleled versatility and broad applicability. Also, it’s improving at a much faster rate than other inventions. (Note that I said improving rather than being improved. At this point, it’s assisting in its own progress. But AI companies aren’t specific about how much humans are contributing to this progress versus how much is accomplished by AI bootstrapping itself. There’s an ongoing debate about how to oversee and control AI progress. Called the alignment problem, many experts are warning that we need to slow down and ensure that AI’s goals align with human goals.)