My brief description of what an AI is

25 February 202425 February 2024

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Let’s hear it from Google’s Machine Learning (sic!) Glossary what they say an artificial intelligence (AI) is:

I am saying that AI is just a fancy marketing term for machine learning (ML), but others may have different characterizations.

Let’s look at how the Glossary defines machine learning:

Apparently, in both definitions for AI and ML, we have models as the fundamental component. So we need a better understanding of what Google (and the ML science) says a model is in this context:

The retainer here is ‘takes an example as input and makes a prediction’. To do so, the model uses ‘a set of parameters and structure (i.e. algorithms)’.

One of the models Google uses it the ‘large language model’ (LLM), which Google describes the following way:

The ‘large’ in LLM comes from the large amount of training and data that is needed. Keep that in mind for later.

Google will tell you that Gemini AI is ‘a multimodal model from Google DeepMind’.

So we need to find out what they mean by multimodal:

Now we have a basic understanding of the fundamentals of what today’s marketing calls AI, and more specifically what lies beneath Google’s Gemini AI.
Google tells us, what the use cases (meaning where and how it can be used) of this technology and what its benefits are