The Applied Tumor Genomics Research Program of University of Helsinki held a seminar day on October 6, 2023. They asked me to deliver a presentation about artificial intelligence and neural networks. It was my great pleasure to do so!
The first part of my talk was about ChatGPT and generative text AI. I followed the lead of Claude Shannon, who in his 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication suggested a simple way for generating new sentences from a given text:
(1) Choose any word from the book. That’s the start of our sentence.
(2) Find the next instance of that word in the book and pick the following word into our sentence.
(3) Find the next instance of the most recent word and pick its follower.
Here is one sample sentence created from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen:
Truth is considered with the visit, was not quit her asleep.
Not so perfect English, but kind of sentence-y anyway.
The audience and I took this up a notch by using not the next but randomly chosen other instance of the desired word in the book. This led us to the delightful literary piece
Truth we dare say nothing
It’s already a bit poetic, no?
So that’s a very crude idea of how ChatGPT works. Here are my slides (ppt 41MB).
In the second part of my talk I explained how convolutional neural networks function. Check out my slides (PDF 48MB).
