Demystifying AI: What Are Foundation Models (and How to Use Them), with Tom Chant

The Scrimba Podcast

Meet Tom Chant 🇬🇧! Tom is a Scrimba instructor who is a part of our in-house team that brought you a brand new career path available on Scrimba.com - the AI engineer Path.

In this episode, we're diving into the world of AI foundation models: what are they, how do they work, and how can you use them to build front-end applications that you, until recently, couldn't even think of unless you were a big company with loads of resources.

AI is fundamentally changing the features and user experience of front-end applications. In this episode, you'll learn how to use different foundation models out there (so, not just OpenAI) for your own projects.

This is the second episode of our series on AI engineering, introducing Scrimba's AI Engineer Path. This path is your gateway to unlocking the full potential of AI for your projects.

🔗 Connect with Tom

• 👩‍💼 Linkedin
• 🐦 Twitter

⏰ Timestamps

• One year is a long time in AI (02:14)
• What are some of the recent applications of AI that have converted the skeptics? (04:06)
• Revenue-boosting usage of the new AI models (07:50)
• Is AI a revolutionary shift for developers? (13:03)
• What are foundation models (15:41)
• How do foundation models work? (18:12)
• Multi-modality of foundation models (20:04)
• What are the differences between different versions of GPT- 3.5, 4, 4 Turbo... (22:20)
• What's OpenAI Whisper? (25:49)
• HuggingFace and are alternatives to OpenAI (28:50)
• What to do if OpenAI goes down? (32:20)
• Why ChatGPT is slow... and running an AI model on your own hardware slower (35:35)
• What is fine-tuning? (38:01)
• What is RAG? (39:12)
• Using RAG can save you money (41:03)
• Scrimba's AI Engineer Path and Tom's course (43:46)
• Social Media Break with Jan the Producer (46:39)

🧰 Resources Mentioned

• The AI Engineer Path

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