What is generative AI and how does it work? – The Turing Lectures with Mirella Lapata

How are technologies like ChatGPT created? And what does the future hold for AI language models?

This talk was filmed at the Royal Institution on 29th September 2023, in collaboration with The Alan Turing Institute.

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Generative AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence that involves creating new and original data or content. Unlike traditional AI models that rely on large datasets and algorithms to classify or predict outcomes, generative AI models are designed to learn the underlying patterns and structure of the data and generate novel outputs that mimic human creativity.

ChatGPT is perhaps the most well-known example, but the field is far larger and more varied than text generation. Other applications of generative AI include image and video synthesis, speech generation, music composition, and virtual reality.

In this lecture, Mirella Lapata will present an overview of this exciting—sometimes controversial—and rapidly evolving field.

Mirella Lapata is professor of natural language processing in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on getting computers to understand, reason with, and generate natural language. She is the first recipient (2009) of the British Computer Society and Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS/IRSG) Karen Sparck Jones award and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the ACL, and Academia Europaea.

00:00 Intro
2:38 Generative AI isn’t new – so what’s changed?
8:43 How did we get to ChatGPT?
12:38 How are Large Language Models created?
22:48 How good can a LLM become?
26:57 Unexpected effects of scaling up LLMs
28:05 How can ChatGPT meet the needs of humans?
32:30 Chat GPT demo
38:07 Are Language Models always right or fair?
40:21 The impact of LLMs on society
42:54 Is AI going to kill us all?