Welcome to the Wild West (and your downloads)
Welcome to the workshop! If you're taking this on your own, you can go at your own pace and experiment as you will, which I highly encourage. Working with AI is one of those things that will blow your mind, make you super excited, then afraid, and then curious.
It's so powerful that it's kind of scary. Truly. You start to wonder: how the heck did it know to do that? I don't know the answer to that question, aside from theoretical musings. I know it has to do with probability and Shannon's Second Theorem (messages sent over a noisy channel - cornerstone of compression theory, data correction, and text prediction) but more than that... I'm lost.
Which is OK, because I also don't know how the machinery behind my laptop screen works, nor do I know Mandarin or why the sun doesn't run out of fuel. I'm sure all of it is incredibly interesting, but I've got a life to live y'know.
That's how I approach AI tools. Specifically: I don't know how they do what they do, or whether I should be afraid of them. I also don't know if I should worry about the sun going out. All I know is that these things are here, and right now they're benefitting me.
Let your curiosity push you to see what's possible, and how you can use this tool to improve your life, because the simple truth is this: it can. And it will, if you let it.
Many people want AI to go away, and I can't blame them. The problem with that stance is that you're going to watch as your peers and colleagues run right by you, and at some point, you're going to be playing catchup. That's the way of this industry: you simply can't fight the change. You can hate the change, but you just can't fight it.
That's what this workshop is all about: helping you turn the foggy map of AI into a well known landscape that you can travel as you need.