Transformers--data models based on neural networks--will radically change how machines interact with us. Artificial intelligence has promised much, but there has been something holding it back from being used successfully by billions of people: a frustrating struggle for humans and machines to understand one another in natural language. This is now changing, thanks to the arrival of large language models powered by transformer architectures, one of the most important AI breakthroughs in the past 20 years. Transformers are neural networks designed to model sequential data and generate a prediction of what should come next in a series. Core to their success is the idea of "attention," which allows the transformer to "attend" to the most salient features of an input rather than trying to process everything.

Since I began teaching, I have only given essay exams. Rather, each exam has two, complex issue-spotter essay questions. The exam is completely open-book. I always tell my students they can bring whatever they want to the classroom–nothing will help them. I also issue a regular warning: do not cheat, because I will spot similarities in writing very quickly.

If you have been connected with the IT news over the last month, you have undoubtedly heard about ChatGPT -- the new AI chatbot from OpenAI. As Andrew Ng rightly said, AI is the new electricity. It is set to revolutionize each aspect of our life, and ChatGPT will change the entire Software Development Life Cycle. It might just seal the fate of some developers. Application development speeds will zoom, and costs will fall drastically.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved to the web. Like it has many times, the web has transformed an abstract concept for most people into tools millions are starting to use. The latest example comes with OpenAI's ChatGPT, the LLM that, in five days, registered more than 1 million people and is now used for all that humanity provides when people embrace new forms of expression. A creative jolt to the all-too-mundane examples of how AI helped some oil company or how cops use it for surveillance. Now AI-based tools are in the hands of millions.

Almost immediately, educators began experimenting with the tool. While the bot's answers to academic questions weren't perfect, they were awfully close to what teachers would expect from many of their students. How long, educators wonder, will it be before students begin using the site to write essays or computer code for them?

There are many others, but natural language processing bots and generative visual AIs like DALLE•2 are advancing particularly fast.

Andromeda is one of the largest AI supercomputers ever built. It delivers more than 1 Exaflop of AI compute and 120 Petaflops of dense compute. Andromeda is the only AI supercomputer to ever demonstrate near-perfect linear scaling on large language model workloads, and is extremely simple to use. Unlike any known GPU-based cluster, Andromeda delivers near-perfect scaling across GPT-class large language models, including GPT-3, GPT-J and GPT-NeoX. Near-perfect scaling means that that as additional CS-2s are used, training time is reduced in near perfect proportion.

Even the New York Times is talking about it. Is the surge of ChatGPT and large AI language models the beginning of the end for Google Search?

Yes, AI can help with programming, but ChatGPT is not ready to be your programming buddy, especially regarding securing your code. Wouldn't it be great to have an AI pair programming friend to help you secure your code? But, while GitHub CoPilot can be handy -- leaving aside whether it's ethical or legal -- AI's new darling chatbot, ChatGPT, isn't ready for programming prime-time. I'll give you that ChatGPT is going to make life much harder for high-school English teachers. Going forward, anyone who assigns a homework paper on To Kill a Mockingbird will be much more likely to get an AI-written document than any real student thought about the literary masterpiece. But programming, especially secure programming, that's another story.

A new peer-reviewed study published in PLOS Digital Health demonstrates how OpenAI's GPT-3 program predicts early stages of dementia from spontaneous speech with a high degree of accuracy. "To our knowledge, this is the first application of GPT-3 to predicting dementia from speech," wrote professor Hualou Liang, Ph.D., and co-author Felix Agbavor at Drexel's School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems. The most common type of dementia is Alzheimer's disease, a neurodegenerative disease that affects an estimated 47 million people worldwide, according to the Alzheimer's Association. By 2030 this figure is expected to grow to 76 million globally, according to the same source. There are 5.8 million Americans with Alzheimer's disease, of which two-thirds are women, according to a report by AARP and the Women's Alzheimer's Movement (WAM).