Trustrorthy AI
Knowledge Base

Foundational Considerations

So it is that we’ve been spending significant time and mental energy thinking about a proper “AI strategy” for organizations that wish to escape the sad fate of the frog, or that of the world’s organizations being left behind by the pace of technological change.

Let’s start by defining what we’re talking about when we discuss “artificial intelligence.” There’s an argument that we could trace the lineage of AI back to the Turing Machine of the 1940s, and then pull that string through the history of computing to include such logic-based “if this, then that” applications all the way through robotic process automation (RPA) technologies of recent years. These technologies lacked real intelligence, given that they were rather extraordinarily intelligent machines created by extraordinarily intelligent people. These machines were designed to make more efficient (or make possible) the intelligence of their creators at scale.

Generative AI is what we have in mind when we think about artificial intelligence today. Here we define 'AI' as the ability of the machine to think independently of its creators or of the parameters its creators have set forth. Generative AI describes the ability of AI to generate unique and original responses - be they textual, imagery, or in some other medium - based on its index of accumulated knowledge. In other words, for the machine to assimilate data in unpredictable ways that conjure new responses, rather than to simply navigate a logical process for which it has been pre-programmed.

It's worth noting that we’ve also seen what we call “multi-modal” AI capabilities markedly mature in 2024. Multi-modal extends previously existing abilities to learn from and generate new text, imagery, video, and other mediums as separate scenarios such that single models can understand and generate across multiple modes. This is a significant development in the ability of an AI workload to wrap its inorganic head around a vastly expanded variety of mediums, which in turn expands both its comprehension and its generative abilities.

All of this is new. It is groundbreaking. Historically speaking, we are in a very different era in late 2024 than we were two years ago, a fact that causes me to encounter two foundational realities time and again.