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How AI Works: From Sorcery to Science

The cover is yellow and reads "How AI Works: From Sorcery to Science". It features a witches hat being lifted to reveal a robot typing on a computer underneath.

By Ronald T. Kneusal (MCompSci'12; PhD'16)
(No Starch Press, 192 pages; 2023) 

Artificial intelligence is everywhere—from self-driving cars, to image generation from text, to the unexpected power of language systems like ChatGPT—yet few people seem to know how it all really works. How AI Works unravels the mysteries of artificial intelligence, without the complex math and unnecessary jargon. You’ll learn:

  • The relationship between artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning
  • The history behind AI and why the artificial intelligence revolution is happening now
  • How decades of work in symbolic AI failed and opened the door for the emergence of neural networks
  • What neural networks are, how they are trained, and why all the wonder of modern AI boils down to a simple, repeated unit that knows how to multiply input numbers to produce an output number.
  • The implications of large language models, like ChatGPT and Bard, on our society—nothing will be the same again