Five Key Aspects of AI, Our Students should learn

The five key aspects of AI, Our Students should learn are:

  1. Prompt Engineering
  2. AI Agents
  3. Multimodal AI
  4. RAG – Retrieval Augmented Generation
  5. Pre-Trained Models

Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering is the process of designing effective inputs (prompts) to guide AI models like GPT, BERT, and Stable Diffusion to produce desired outputs. It optimizes interactions between humans and AI models.


1. Types of Prompting

a. Zero-Shot Prompting

  • No prior examples; AI infers the answer from general knowledge.
  • Example:
    Prompt: “What are the symptoms of diabetes?”
    Response: AI lists common symptoms.

b. One-Shot Prompting

  • Provides one example to guide the AI.
  • Example:
    Prompt: “Translate ‘Hello’ to French. Answer: Bonjour.
    Now translate ‘Goodbye’ to French.”
    Response: “Au revoir.”

c. Few-Shot Prompting

  • Gives multiple examples to enhance accuracy.
  • Example:
    Prompt:
    “Translate the following:
    • ‘Hello’ → ‘Bonjour’
    • ‘Goodbye’ → ‘Au revoir’
    • ‘Thank you’ → ?”
      Response: “Merci.”

d. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting

  • Encourages AI to explain step-by-step reasoning before giving an answer.
  • Example:
    Prompt: “If a train moves at 60 km/h and travels for 2.5 hours, how far does it go? Think step by step.”
    Response: AI breaks down the calculation and answers correctly.

e. Instruction-Based Prompting

  • Clearly defines what the model should do.
  • Example:
    Prompt: “Summarize this article in 3 bullet points.”

2. Techniques for Effective Prompts

  • Be Clear and Specific: Ambiguous prompts lead to poor outputs.
    “Summarize this text in 50 words.”
    “Summarize this.”
  • Use Constraints: Define length, style, or format.
    “Generate a professional email template for a job inquiry.”
  • Provide Context: Helps AI understand the task.
    “You are an AI tutor. Explain Newton’s Laws in simple words.”
  • Use Role-Based Prompts: Assign a persona to AI.
    “Act as a historian and describe the impact of the Chola dynasty.”
  • Use Delimiters: Helps AI focus.
    “Summarize the following text between triple quotes:
    ”’The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell…”’.”

3. Advanced Prompting Techniques

a. Prompt Chaining

  • Using multiple prompts sequentially to refine AI output.
  • Example:
    1. Generate an outline for an essay.
    2. Expand each section into paragraphs.

b. Self-Consistency

  • Runs multiple variations of a prompt and picks the best response.

c. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

  • Combines AI with external document retrieval for more accurate answers.

4. Applications

  • Chatbots & Virtual Assistants – Natural and context-aware conversations.
  • Content Creation – Blogs, summaries, and creative writing.
  • Education – AI tutoring with structured prompts.
  • Coding Assistance – Generating or debugging code.
  • Data Analysis – AI-assisted insights from structured data.

Prompt engineering is crucial for maximizing AI efficiency, reducing hallucinations, and improving accuracy across various applications.

AI Agents

AI agents are autonomous programs or systems that can perceive their environment, make decisions, and take actions to achieve specific goals. They can range from simple rule-based bots to advanced models using deep learning. Here are some common types of AI agents:

  1. Simple Reflex Agents – Act based on current percepts, without considering history. Example: Thermostat.
  2. Model-Based Reflex Agents – Maintain an internal model of the world to make better decisions. Example: Chess-playing AI.
  3. Goal-Based Agents – Act to achieve specific goals by considering future consequences. Example: Self-driving cars.
  4. Utility-Based Agents – Optimize actions based on a utility function to maximize outcomes. Example: Recommendation systems.
  5. Learning Agents – Improve over time by learning from experience. Example: ChatGPT, AlphaGo.

Applications include robotics, virtual assistants, stock trading bots, and medical diagnosis systems.

Multimodality

Multimodality in AI refers to the ability of a system to process and integrate multiple types of data, such as text, images, audio, video, and sensor inputs. This allows AI models to understand and generate more complex and contextually rich outputs.

Key Aspects of Multimodal AI

  1. Multiple Input Types – Processes different data sources simultaneously (e.g., combining images and text).
  2. Cross-Modal Understanding – Establishes relationships between different types of data (e.g., linking spoken words to images).
  3. Multimodal Learning – Uses multiple data sources for training to enhance performance.
  4. Fusion Mechanisms – Integrates information using early fusion (combining data before processing) or late fusion (combining results after separate processing).

Examples of Multimodal AI

  • Vision-Language Models (e.g., GPT-4V, DALL·E) – Generate images from text prompts or describe images in text.
  • Speech-Text Models (e.g., Whisper, Siri, Google Assistant) – Convert speech to text and vice versa.
  • Medical Diagnosis – AI systems analyze X-rays, medical notes, and lab reports together.
  • Autonomous Vehicles – Process images, radar, and LiDAR to navigate safely.

Multimodal AI enhances contextual understanding, improves decision-making, and enables richer human-AI interactions.

RAG – Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an AI framework that enhances the output of generative models by integrating external knowledge retrieval. It improves accuracy, reduces hallucinations, and enables up-to-date responses by fetching relevant information from external sources before generating text.

How RAG Works

  1. Query Processing – The model takes user input (query).
  2. Retrieval Mechanism – Searches for relevant information from external databases, documents, or APIs.
  3. Fusion – Integrates retrieved knowledge with the generative model’s internal knowledge.
  4. Response Generation – Produces a factually grounded response.

Key Benefits

  • Improved Accuracy – Uses real-time data instead of relying only on pre-trained knowledge.
  • Reduced Hallucinations – Limits the risk of generating false or outdated information.
  • Domain Adaptability – Can be fine-tuned for legal, medical, or technical applications.
  • Scalability – Works with vast knowledge bases without increasing model size.

Applications

  • Chatbots & Virtual Assistants – Provide precise answers from up-to-date knowledge sources.
  • Enterprise Search – Enhances customer support by retrieving company-specific information.
  • Medical & Legal AI – Fetches verified documents before generating recommendations.
  • Code Assistance – Retrieves documentation and coding examples dynamically.

Popular implementations of RAG include OpenAI’s GPT with retrieval tools, Meta’s RAG architecture, and enterprise solutions integrating vector databases like FAISS, Pinecone, and Weaviate.

Pretrained Model Creation: Steps and Considerations

A pretrained model is an AI model trained on a large dataset before being fine-tuned for specific tasks. It helps improve efficiency, accuracy, and reduces the need for large datasets in downstream tasks.


1. Data Collection & Preprocessing

  • Source Selection: Gather large-scale, high-quality datasets (text, images, audio, etc.).
  • Cleaning: Remove noise, duplicates, and irrelevant data.
  • Tokenization & Vectorization: Convert raw data into a machine-readable format.
  • Data Augmentation: Apply transformations like synonym replacement, cropping, or noise addition.

2. Model Selection

  • Architecture Choice:
    • CNNs – Image processing (e.g., ResNet, EfficientNet).
    • Transformers – Text processing (e.g., BERT, GPT).
    • RNNs/LSTMs – Sequential data like speech or time series.
    • GANs – Image generation (e.g., StyleGAN, DALL·E).
  • Frameworks:
    • TensorFlow/Keras
    • PyTorch
    • Hugging Face Transformers

3. Training the Model

  • Loss Function: Choose based on task (e.g., Cross-Entropy for classification, MSE for regression).
  • Optimization Algorithm: Use Adam, SGD, or RMSprop for gradient updates.
  • Hyperparameter Tuning: Adjust batch size, learning rate, dropout, etc.
  • Pretraining Strategy:
    • Self-Supervised Learning: Pretrain on unsupervised data.
    • Transfer Learning: Use an existing pretrained model as a base.
    • Contrastive Learning: Improve embeddings by training with positive/negative pairs.

4. Evaluation & Fine-Tuning

  • Metrics:
    • Classification: Accuracy, F1-score.
    • NLP: BLEU, ROUGE, Perplexity.
    • Vision: mAP, IoU.
  • Fine-Tuning:
    • Train on domain-specific datasets to improve performance.
    • Reduce learning rate to retain general knowledge from pretraining.

5. Deployment & Optimization

  • Model Compression: Prune unnecessary weights, quantization for smaller sizes.
  • Serving Frameworks:
    • ONNX – Interoperability across platforms.
    • TensorFlow Serving / TorchServe – Deploy at scale.
    • Hugging Face Hub – Share models with APIs.
  • Hardware Optimization:
    • GPU/TPU acceleration for speed.
    • Edge AI deployment using TensorRT or TFLite.

6. Continuous Learning & Updates

  • Periodically retrain on fresh data to adapt to changes.
  • Implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for up-to-date knowledge.
  • Use Reinforcement Learning (e.g., RLHF) for human-aligned improvements.

Popular pretrained models include BERT, GPT, ViT, ResNet, and Whisper, which can be fine-tuned for various applications.