Artificial Intelligence

Table Of Contents:
Introduction | Landscape | Postscript

Artificial Intelligence means different things to different people.
I have been curious about the limits of what computers can do for as long as I can remember.
After a few personal experiences I am a converted sceptic about some of the prolific hyperbole surrounding AI. Some people even all it an AI boom.

The details are very important to those setting up the necessary infrastructure to make it all work transparently. If you read even part of this page, please let me know, especially if you find something helpful. I would love to hear what you think about these and related topics.

Why explore AI? Everyone has different reasons. The exponential growth is a key interest. I try to provide many answers below. Many sciences are involved, things that we use every day. AI has been in formal research and development since 1956 but has reallly taken off since virtual assistants (perhaps a device in your home), self-driving cars, speech and image recognition, chatbots, vibe coding (coined in 2025, great book) and large langauge models (list) were deployed. The Turing test by Alan Turing in 1949 is still used as a benchmark. I focus more on results and products than the research side of AI which is extensive as well. Many people may not realize there are quite a few types. Robotics and drones are advancing in parallel, the combination providing unique capabilities. Even non-player characters in video games can be thought of, in hind sight, as primitive AIs but not in the modern sense. Generative artificial intelligence is a current frontier. AGI has not been acknowledge in public yet.

A newly released book from an insider is The Next RenAIssance (Amazon) by Zack Kass. Even in the Kindle sample of the book he makes a strong case for how our coming economic transition was already been outlined by John Maynard Keynes in 1930.

Here is another reason to explore - the expectations that have been set by some amazing AI demos. As Steve and Gene write in Vibe Coding, "The most dangerous thing about AI coding demos is that they're real. Those 'one-shot wonder' demos where someone types 'Make me a flight simulator with machine guns' and gets a playable game in seconds have created wildly unrealistic expectations. Developers new to vibe coding toss similarly large, ill-defined requests at AI and are disappointed when it fails. But great software has never been built by dumping vague goals onto someone and walking away. It comes from creating clear specifications that decompose big problems into manageable pieces." They go on to outline the problems with current AI reseults and how to avoid them.

First, go to anthropic.skilljar.com right now.
If you are technical and know something about AI already, start with Claude Code 101, otherwise start with Claude 101.

My best advice to anyone interested in any level of technology is to watch the documentary CE5: A New Frontier of Contact (free on tubi), the documentary The Lost Century (trailer, full documentary) and the documentary Breaking the Science Barrier (trailer).
Perhaps no longer surprisingly, anyone who has looked at any of the evidence at all can no longer say we are alone in the universe.
It seems we never were.

A growing number of people say SETI has succeeded but not acknowledged their own success despite the high likelihood of success. (1950s Fermi Paradox) There is ample evidence that technologies, some patented and confiscated, based on advanced physics like zero-point energy, electromagnetic gravitics and faster than light communications (without electro-magnetic waves) are being actively suppressed.
A growing number of inventors and people in the know have been killed to keep these and related secrets.
One of the most sensitive parts of secrecy is the purposeful imitation of aliens by humans and the use of reversed engineered technologies for obfuscating, illegal and unconstitutional activities.
Some people in law enforcement and the US government are now actively investigating illegally classified operations taking place around the world, a real conspiracy that can be proven in courts of law, not a dismissable theory any more.
The truth feels much stranger than fiction due to 70+ years of socially engineered disinformation and the lack of powerful people being willing to standing up to these extremely powerful criminals.
For more details see my radio page starting with Quantum.

Of course the next thing anyone interested in AI should do is to try it ASAP. The biggest names people recognize are OpenAI ChatGPT.com (wiki). You can use it without an account. A free account will save your chat history. OpenAI was the company that got the most press for it's public facing interface.

Most search engines these days have an ai mode button after a search. I find them helpful but there is more down this rabbit hole. Some preductions are pretty wild, some are obvious hyperbole, some are hard to take seriously. That is what I thought too but a lot of really smart people do take them seriously and as I have done more research I feel you should too.

Introduction

A good 2024 documentary from a basic level is AI Evolution available for streaming on multiple searvices. The script writer talks about the coming of Big Hero 6 (2014) and H.E.R. movies in the cinematic popular culture after the depiction of AI by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey where (spoiler) HAL does not perform like he should and where The Matrix (1999) depicts (spoiler) the enslavement of humans as batteries for robots in a dystopian future without us knowing it.

A very helpful 2024 documentary that helps provide context is called The Thinking Game (trailer, 2 min). It is fully available via Amazon Prime and youtube. Even now in 2026 the speed of advancement is suprisingly shocking to casual observers. Deepmind was founded in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2014. The stories include those of Demis Hassabis as a prodigy chess player under 8, the founding of Deepmind, Alpha Go, Alpha Star, Alpha Fold, the Covid-19 interruptions and the future. The setting is London despite diesires by some to move the company to Sillycon Valley. The Facebook/Meta internal mantra of "move fast and break things", now somewhat revised, was contrasted with a more disciplined approach to the fundamental research approach by Deepmind.

What really strikes me are the parallels and references to topics I have studied for other reasons. Google's Eric Schmidt cited the 1957 launch of Sputnik I as "the Sputnik moment." The analogy put forth by Ken Cukier (Big Data from Ted, 15 min) and by Demmis himself likened Demis to J Robert Oppenheimer in pursuit of the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test.

Demis' story as a young chess player brought him full circle. He intuitivvely gave up chess because he thought that kind of brain power should be harnessed to do more good in the world, not just play chess. Games used to train AIs were Atari games, Go, Chess, Starcraft. Games are for recreational purposes. The same ideas inherent in games and technology can and have often been used for weapons as well. Discussion of these concerns is important in light of rapidly developing AI. Demis' time at University of Cambridge is outlined.

When they jumped to Alpha Fold the wise words of Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse are striking. It doesn't help if you have the tallest ladder going to the moon. If you want to do biologyical research you have to be prepared to fail. "(Paul has) run a laboratory for nearly 50 years and half my time I am just an amateur psychologist to keep my colleagues cheerful when nothnig works and quite a lot of the time, and I mean 80-90% it does not work. If you are at the forefront of science I can assure you will fail a great deal." I am reminded of the concerns of someone I was lucky enogh to call a friend for a while, Dr Douglas Engelbart, a pioneer in computer science. Spoiler: Demis and colleague John Jumper win the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Landscape

The 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need was authored by eight Google Scientists who are called Team Transformer. It introduced the transformer architecture, the main architectuere of AI models to do multimodal generative answers.

The release of OpenAI's ChatGPT.com product, a public chat bot, on 30 Nov 2022 using GPT-3 was the big step making the technology widely available. The model was available for *months* before chatgpt.com but it was not until the web interface that it was widely acknowledged for the advanced capabilities it had over other models. After OpenAI and ChatGPT, a sampling of the AI company names (search) most people may have heard about in this space are:

abc.xyz (wiki) google.com AI Mode and Gemini
amazon.com (wiki) alexa (wiki)
microsoft.com (wiki) copilot (wiki)
apple.com (wiki) siri (wiki)
meta.com (wiki, Meta AI) and facebook.com (wiki)
perplexity.ai (wiki) perplexity.ai and the comet (wiki)
Anthropic.com (wiki) claude.ai (wiki)
x.ai (wiki) grok.com (wiki)
Brave Software (wiki browser) and DuckDuckGo.com search engine users use Duck.ai summaries
replit.com (wiki)
lovable.dev (wiki company, Jul 2025 forbes.com)
speechelo.com provides text to speech voices
midjourney.com (wiki company) provides graphics generated by AI
stability.ai (wiki) first released stablediffusionweb.com (wiki company) in 2022. It provides graphics generated by AI

Postscript

The date format used on the page with spaces is intended to allow searching: two digit day, three letter month abbreviation and four digit year without commas.

I started this page in 2026. Thank you to all the contributors who have helped me keep this page updated. Email is encouraged to <grantbow@gmail.com>.

Last update: 20260428