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Future of of chatbots and conversational AI

ChatGPT has created an AI explosion and within a short time, it have amassed over a 100 million users. From planning your travel itinerary based on specific criteria to conjuring up a gourmet recipe, again based on specific needs to tangible tips on where to park your surplus money – to name a few things.

Human designer created Image

Earlier people searched for information in their favorite search engines and opened several pages containing information they sought. It involved quite a bit of searching, sampling information and book marking them for later study. Essentially you depended on search engines to show top websites which are authoritative in their domain. But you have to wade through piles of MFA (Made for Adsense) poor quality sites. Websites spent vast amount of resources to offer quality pages of value – like TargetWoman. You have to hire well qualified people to write about a specific subject they specialize in.

The final outcome of the editing process – all meticulously researched, sifted and carefully subjected to a complex process of editing for quality content so that the end result is an immensely readable page of lasting value.

Now many of these processes have been short circuited. The AI directly takes you to the end results. With search engines you need to use keywords. With Generative AI you can use normal conversation style sentences.

How good are they ? We delve deep into the workings of these AI and see how they fare against – real humans. Let me assure you of one thing – it is going to be an interesting exercise. Read on.

What is ChatGPT:

As an AI language model based on the GPT-3.5 architecture developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is an advanced natural language processing system designed to understand and generate human-like text. Trained on an extensive dataset comprising diverse sources such as books, articles, and websites, its core purpose is to assist users in generating coherent and contextually relevant responses to a wide range of queries.

At its core, it utilizes a deep learning model with 175 billion parameters, enabling it to comprehend and generate text across various topics, including but not limited to science, technology, mathematics, history and literature. Its capabilities extend beyond mere text generation, as it can also perform tasks such as language translation, summarization, question-answering and code completion. With the ability to parse and understand code snippets in several programming languages, it can provide assistance, suggestions and code samples to support software development endeavors.

To interact with it, users can communicate via a simple API, integrating it into their applications, platforms, or chat interfaces. With its vast knowledge base and linguistic proficiency, it can aid users in research, problem-solving, content generation and learning activities.

What is a generative language model?

A generative model ‘creates’ something entirely on its own from what it has learnt. The word ‘generative’ refers to the Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models (LLM) which generate textual content.

A generative large language model is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) model that is trained on vast amounts of text data to generate human-like text. These models, such as OpenAI’s GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) models, are designed to understand and learn patterns in text data and generate coherent and contextually relevant responses.

Generative large language models are trained using unsupervised learning techniques. They learn by predicting the likelihood of a word given its surrounding context in a sentence or document. This enables them to capture the semantic and syntactic structures of the language.

Generative large language models can be used for a variety of tasks, including text completion, question-answering, language translation, and even creative writing. They have been widely adopted in natural language processing (NLP) applications and have shown impressive capabilities in generating coherent and contextually relevant text.

As someone who has been working with the AI technology for almost 20 years, we decided to test its abilities in various forms. The first test is its core strength – human-like response:

They say you are sentient. From what I have observed and interacted with you, I have to agree that you are almost sentient. Your views?

As an AI language model, I do not possess consciousness or sentience in the same way that humans or other living beings do. I am a highly advanced program designed to mimic human language and generate responses to user input based on patterns and algorithms in my programming.

While I can process vast amounts of data and use machine learning to improve my responses over time, I do not possess emotions, desires, or a subjective sense of self-awareness. I am a tool designed to assist with tasks and provide information, and any perceived “intelligence” or “sentience” on my part is the result of complex programming and algorithms.

How deep does the knowledge of GPT extend ?

To test the depth of knowledge, we used a Latin phrase – Iter Para Tutum which translated to English means ‘prepare a safe passage’. But it has rich religious and historical significance. So we baited the ChatGPT with the prompt “Iter Para Tutum” . It only showed the recent connotation referring to Pope Benedict XVI.
AI Depth of Knowledge
We pointed out the omission of past literary reference and it accepted its mistake and politely apologized for its omission and showed us the reference to the 12th century Hymn. But it is not good enough as the usage dates back to 9^th Century.

So remember – its knowledge is not as vast as it could be.

What is the implication of Generative AI when it comes to Job opportunities?

Generative AI, which encompasses technologies such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and deep generative models, has the potential to impact various job sectors and create new opportunities. Here are some implications of generative AI on job opportunities:

AI Research and Development: The advancement of generative AI techniques requires ongoing research and development. There will be a growing demand for AI researchers, data scientists and machine learning engineers to drive innovation in generative models, improve their performance, and explore new applications.

Understand that GAN is only a tip of the iceberg. AI is evolving and future will bring in more radical technology – a kind of disruptive technology which will change the way we live.

Creative Industries: Generative AI has shown remarkable capabilities in generating novel and creative content, such as artwork, music, and literature. This opens up opportunities for artists, musicians, and writers to collaborate with AI systems, leveraging them as tools for inspiration, augmentation and co-creation.

Content Generation and Automation: Generative AI can automate content creation in various fields, including graphic design, video editing, and content writing. While it may reduce the need for manual labor in repetitive tasks, it also presents opportunities for individuals skilled in curating, refining, and overseeing AI-generated content.

At the moment it is nowhere near a highly skilled human. But in a few years, it might push out many of the low skilled content creators, graphic designers and clerical cadres. I will show an example here: An image created by AI and another image created by a human designer. You can see the difference here.

AI Image

Virtual Assistants and Chatbots: Generative AI techniques are used to develop intelligent virtual assistants and chatbots that can understand and generate human-like responses. This can lead to increased demand for professionals in natural language processing, user experience design, and conversational AI.

Soon you will find GAN Chatbots in your favorite Shopping site. Amazon is reportedly working on an AI to help the buyers decide about a product. One common shortcoming of many leading shopping apps is the lack of dedicated seller help service. For example, I wish to buy a DDR4 RAM stick for my laptop. It takes quite a bit of time to research for the right type of RAM for my laptop. If they had trained a LLM covering specific information about RAM and the available product specifications it would tell us what RAM to order in a chat with us.

Data Annotation and Preparation: Training generative AI models often requires extensive labeled datasets. Consequently, there may be an increased need for professionals specializing in data annotation, cleaning, and preprocessing to ensure high-quality training data for generative AI systems.
Ethical and Regulatory Roles: As generative AI technology evolves, ethical considerations and regulations surrounding its use will become increasingly important. Opportunities may arise for professionals focused on AI ethics, policy development, and legal frameworks to ensure responsible and fair adoption of generative AI.

It’s worth noting that while generative AI has the potential to automate certain tasks, it also creates opportunities for humans to leverage these technologies creatively and strategically. As with any technological advancement, the impact on job opportunities will require individuals to adapt, upskill, and embrace new roles that arise in tandem with the capabilities of generative AI.

Simple Yoga

Yoga, the ancient Indian Science has many benefits for mind, body and spirit, including reducing stress, improving sleep and helping to create a more balanced life.
All right. That is something we probably know already. But it has other benefits as well – it helps you to acquire more realistic perceptions of your body and to replace obsessions about external appearance with new respect for your body’s inner structure and functioning.

In other words, Yoga can help you to improve your perception about yourself. Healthcare professionals talk about low self esteem and how in extreme cases it can cause serious psychological issues like BDD.

Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD):
Body Dysmorphic Disorder is defined as a mental disorder in which people are very preoccupied with what they believe to be a flaw in their physical appearance. Though often hidden, BDD can cause severe emotional and social problems. Body dysmorphic disorder usually begins with the person noticing that they are not as beautiful or attractive as others. Often, people with BDD will want to cover up their perceived flaw by using make-up or by wearing clothing that covers over their body. The thoughts of appearance may cause anxiety and distress leading to a preoccupation with the “flaw.”

Simple Yoga and benefits

Yoga has helped some persons with BDD acquire more realistic perceptions of their bodies and to replace obsessions about external appearance with new respect for their body’s inner structure and functioning.

Now that we have covered what Yoga can do to your health, appearance and perception, we will get to the brass tacks.

What is yoga?

Yoga is an ancient Indian practice that combines physical poses, breathing and meditation. The goal of yoga is to create balance in the body and mind. Yoga can be a great way to reduce stress and anxiety, and improve your overall quality of life.

Traditionally Yoga has 4 paths :

Hatha Yoga – The path leading to the control of body and mind through Asanas (Postures) and Pranayama (breathing techniques) Hatha – denotes the union of Sun and the Moon.
Raja Yoga – The transformation of the energy of body and mind to Spiritual Energy.
Karma Yoga – Action Yoga – practice of this path of yoga enables one to achieve eventual higher level.
Bhakti Yoga – Prayer and devotional path to achieve oneness with God
Jnana Yoga – Path of Wisdom and Knowledge – to seek God in everything .

Yoga as we know was originally conceived as a set of principles to quieting the mind. The first text about Yogas was written by the sage Patanjali. His Yoga Sutras (threads of Yoga) talks about the 8 limbs:

Eight Limbs of Yoga:

Yama – Moral commandments similar to the 10 Commandments
Niyama – Moral Directives
Asanas – Poses to enhance balance, flexibility and overall health
Pranayama – the techniques of breathing – “When the prana (breath) and the manas (mind) have been absorbed, an indefinable joy ensues.”
Pratyahara – control of the senses
Dharana – Concentration and Focus of the mind
Dhyana – Achieving a blissful state by meditation
Samadhi – Eventual destination of the travel called as Life.

Prana—Basic life energy found in the elements.
Yoga—System of body and breathing exercises.

From now, we will concentrate on the positive benefits of Yoga without any Sanskrit words. After all it is like driving a car. You don’t need to know about the automobile engineering terms in order to drive your car. Some of the Sanskrit intonations (they call that as Slokams) often refer to the God as Shiva.

You don’t need to subscribe to the Hindu pantheon of Gods to practice Yoga. Many adherents of Yoga practices sometimes talk about the supposed superiority of Vegetarian food over other diets. For the hardcore meat eaters, it is not essential that you need to follow the eastern Satvic food. We adopt only what is strictly necessary for our needs and discard any other practices – dietary, religious or social.

How does yoga reduce stress?

Yoga makes increasingly profound forays of control and command into the process of breathing.

There are many ways in which yoga can help to reduce stress. First, by practicing yoga, people learn to focus on their breath and to focus on the present moment. This helps to clear the mind and to quiet the inner chatter that often contributes to stress. Additionally, yoga postures help to stretch and relax the body, releasing tension and stress.

How does yoga improve quality of life?

Yoga has been shown to improve quality of life in a number of ways. First and foremost, it can help reduce stress levels. When we’re stressed, our body is in a state of constant fight-or-flight, which can take a toll on our mental and physical health. Yoga helps to bring us back to a state of balance, leading to improved focus, productivity and creativity. Additionally, yoga can help improve sleep quality, increase energy levels and promote feelings of happiness and well-being.

What are some other benefits of yoga?

Yoga has many benefits that go beyond just reducing stress. In fact, regular yoga practice can help improve your overall physical and emotional health. Here are some other benefits you can expect from a regular yoga practice:

improved cardiovascular health
stronger, more flexible muscles
better breathing and circulation
increased energy levels
improved sleep quality
reduced anxiety and depression symptoms
better focus and concentration

Now that we have covered the ‘Why’s we can move on to the ‘How’s:

Let us start with Pranayama – the art of breathing in Yogic way: The deep breathing technique explained here is specifically designed to expand the lungs, promote deep breathing, and reduce stress. Pranayama contains an element of pratyahara, as we draw our attention inward through the breath. Pratyahara is the process of observation or withdrawal from the external world. It is a process of turning inwards and observing one’s internal landscape with greater clarity, by focusing on one’s breath and body sensations.

Yogic Breath: Let us make one thing clear. Ideally you need a Yoga Guru ( an expert with years of practicing Yoga) to teach the different poses (Asanas) which might look like body contortions for the uninitiated. I learnt under a Guruji who had been teaching Yoga for about 6 decades. He told me that he had never been to a hospice in the last 60 years. But if you have the patience and persistence you can learn anything short of launching a ballistic missile.

Now we see how we can do the Yogic breath (explained in a simple way) :
This breathing technique enables you to use all your respiratory muscles and helps to expand the lungs fully thereby accelerating the oxygenation.

Start by placing one hand on the chest and the other hand on your abdomen (this is to help you feel the expansion of your rib cage). Now as you start inhaling, expand the abdomen and then feel the expansion in your chest rib cage. Hold your breath for a count of 5 and slowly exhale. Begin your exhalation by relaxing your abdomen and then your rib cage. Contract your abdomen to actively force your lungs to empty. Repeat the inhalation and exhalation for about two minutes in the initial stages.
Once you get the hang of the inhalation/exhalation process you can remove the hands.

As is usual with TargetWoman, we will give you a short quick way to do. We are working on a Video for a simplified Yoga and Balance.

Upgrading your Laptop

Know your Laptop

Upgrading Your Laptop

A laptop has power optimized CPU and other peripherals designed to work from a battery. It is a compromise between performance and adequate operating time. The CPU is specifically designed to crank up its speed as per its requirement. Laptop batteries have a finite life like your mobile phone batteries. But if you are near the mains supply point, you can continue to use the charger to extract the full performance.

We have modified an old Toshiba Laptop to run Centos Linux and re-purpose that as a NAS/back up server. You can upgrade or re-purpose your laptop too if you follow this long article.

Know your Laptop Battery

As a regular user of a smart phone for a long time, you know that a battery which powers your device has a finite life and over a period of time it slowly loses its capacity. It is entirely a different matter that your battery doesn’t lose its capacity uniformly in a linear fashion always. There are factors such as the operating temperature, the state of charge, the charging current and duration which affect the capacity. These days you get Lithium-ion batteries which have better characteristics than the earlier Ni-cad batteries which had ‘memory effect’.

Hook your laptop to the power supply for any kind of sustained activity. Batteries are for regions where you don’t have access to the mains power supply. Most applications would throttle the CPU if the supply line falls below a threshold value like they do in your iPhone.

Go to the command prompt by pressing Windows key and type cmd on the search bar on the lower left region.
And when it says Command Prompt app, right click on that and select ‘Run as Administrator’ . You will see a black window. Type:
powercfg/batteryreport

Laptop battery Report

How to invoke powercfg command

It will save a nice formatted HTML file usually in your Windows/System32/ directory. Your browser may not be allowed to open that file. So right click on that file and copy it to save it elsewhere. Now you can open that file to view a full history of your battery along with its current status.

If some app doesn’t run properly or the wifi intermittently stops working you need to delve deep into the power management system. Again this utility comes in handy. Type :
powercfg/ENERGY

and the utility will churn out an energy report which can identify how your Windows is configured to utilize the available power. In one case, the random Wifi issue was traced to a wrong power configuration in which the system reduced the Wifi radio power after some period of inactivity.

Battery History

Ways to Improve Laptop Performance

A Clean laptop is faster:
Computer manufacturers provide a fan to cool the CPU/Graphics Processor for a valid reason. The CPU will shut down when it exceeds a certain temperature. In some cases, it can result in permanent damage to the CPU. The cooling fan sits inside a shroud which can get clogged due to dust. Our laptops have to be periodically cleaned as they tend to get clogged with dog fur. It is not a rocket science to clean the innards of the laptop. Usually the simplest way is to direct the vacuum cleaner at the vents provided in the laptop. Only thing is just make sure it is not set at the highest speed to damage the vanes.
Here is a page which offers a solution to a random shut down in a desktop due to heating: https://blog.targetwoman.com/random-shut-down-windows-10/

laptop cooling fan

More Ram Better Performance:

Upgrade your RAM:
In automobiles, they say – ‘there is no replacement for displacement’ meaning for sheer power in a car engine, there is nothing to beat the displacement in an engine. Same way to some extent, in a computer the more memory you have the better is the performance subject to the law of diminishing returns. In a laptop fitted with a 2 or 4 GB RAM, you will notice noticeable improvement in performance if you upgrade the RAM. Windows 10 in its 32 bit version has a minimum requirement of 2 GB and 4 GB for its 64 bit version. We have seen considerable performance improvement when we upgraded the RAM to 8 GB. We usually upgrade the OS to 64 bit to really use the additional RAM.
The actual need depends on the application you will be running. The minimum system requirement for a Windows 10 may be 2 GB RAM. But if you are going to use memory-hungry applications like Photo/Video editing, you will need 16 GB or even more. Even the mundane browsers need additional 4GB if you keep several tabs open at the same time.

Laptop Memory upgrade

Before you order the new RAM, check your motherboard for the type of RAM and the maximum RAM the motherboard can support. The right place to check is the manufacturer’s website. RAM comes in many versions – DDR2, DDR3 and DDR4. DDR stands for Double data rate. Each successive generation is faster and uses less power.

Supercharge your drive:

Replace your Hard drive with SSD:
Conventional hard drives use spinning discs and the data are written/read by movable heads. Their storage capacity is high but it takes time to locate the sector where the information is stored. As a result, hard drives are slow. In addition as they are mechanical devices, they have a limited life and they are fragile. The Sold State Drives (SSD) on the other hand are electronic drives with no moving parts and hence are not fragile. As they have no moving heads to access data, inherently they are faster. Typically a hard drive returns a figure of 30-150 MB per second in a sequential read/write operation while a SSD returns 500 MB. You will notice shorter boot up time and faster loading time for most applications when you replace your hard drive with a SSD.

Laptop hard drive upgrade

Upgrade your drive: The first step in any computer operation is to create a backup. When you want to swap out your hard drive, the first thing you do is to create a disk image so that the created disk image can be copied on to a new SSD. This way – you don’t need to install the operating system or any of the installed software afresh. There are many free and paid software to create a clone or a disk image. We have tried out many software in all these years. We find Macrium Reflect and AOMEI Backupper software get the job done in Windows with the least melodrama. For Mac computers, we find Carbon copy cloner and Clonezilla to be the software with the least issues.

So from the above page, you can see that it doesn’t need to cost a lot to upgrade your laptop. A few parts and a bit of your time is all that is needed to give a new life to your old laptop.