How Does AI Work Anyway?
I once heard someone say that data scientists “don’t know” what’s happening under the covers of an artificial intelligence program. This sounded like a challenge. Piqued with curiosity, “How does AI work?” is the question I set out to answer last summer, and I chose to answer that question in one of the more difficult ways possible – by reading an AI white paper and implementing the code in a language I barely understood. “Why would I do such a thing?” and “Why not just work through the well-written and free tutorials that the Internet offers?” are both reasonable and rational questions you might ask. To answer the first question, I wanted to accomplish three things: learn Go, learn AI, and provide myself a challenge. Check, check, aaand check! To answer the second question, in all seriousness, I’ve learned that the hardest lessons learned in life are those that stick with you the longest. The aim of this presentation is to walk you through what I’ve discovered along my journey and perhaps help other learn-it-the-hard-way-because-you-also-have-questionable-long-term-memory adventurers.