Matt Holder spends some time discovering how AI, ML and LLM can be used to help us with our programming – and, yes, he explains what the acronyms mean as well…
Science fiction has been dreaming up stories about artificial intelligence for decades now, covering everything from robots performing household chores through to the computer systems in Star Trek. Meanwhile back on Earth, scientific research within the vast field of artificial intelligence has been ongoing for the past 60 years or so.
One of the best-known applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning is the digital assistant, as launched with the iPhone 4S in the early 2010s. Over the last few years, though, we have seen an explosion of tools that use various aspects of artificial intelligence. These cover a vast range of areas, from image recognition, audio processing, the creation of deep fake videos and digital assistants all the way through to the coding tools we are going to discuss today.
We are looking at artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and large language models (LLMs), and how they can be used to improve our professional lives. Programming is a vast field, with a huge range of languages, each of which is best used in a different area. For example, JavaScript is used to add interactivity to websites and can also be used for server-side code, using Node. Python is incredibly popular in data science, while C is excellent for work that needs to interact directly with kernels. The tools we are going to discuss here are designed to help programmers write code and test it for security issues. They are not, however, infallible and care needs to be taken when using them, as we’ll discover…
What is AI?
Before we start looking at specifics, let’s examine B some terminology. According to John McCarthy of the computer science department at Stanford University, artificial intelligence (AI) is “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs”. This definition is incredibly broad, which goes to show what a massive field AI is. Intelligence can mean many things, of course, but the sometimes unreliable Wikipedia states: “Artificial intelligence is intelligence – perceiving, synthesising and inferring information – demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by humans or by other animals. Intelligence encompasses the ability to learn and to reason, to generalise and to infer meaning.”
The Cambridge Dictionary defines machine learning (ML) as “the process of computers changing the way they carry out tasks by learning from new data, without a human being needing to give instructions in the form of a program”. This covers the ability to ingest huge amounts of information and find patterns. The pattern discovery allows the program to improve its knowledge of a particular topic as time goes
