How AI Works: From Sorcery to Science

AI isn’t magic. How AI Works demystifies the explosion of artificial intelligence by explaining—without a single mathematical equation—what happened, when it happened, why it happened, how it happened, and what AI is actually doing “under the hood.”

How AI Works is for people who want to understand the process without burying themselves in the mathematics and coding required to implement AI. For that, see my books Practical Deep Learning: A Python-Based Introduction and Math for Deep Learning: What You Need to Know to Understand Neural Networks, both from No Starch Press.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere—from self-driving cars, to image generation from text, to the unexpected power of language systems like ChatGPT—yet few people seem to know how it all really works. How AI Works unravels the mysteries of artificial intelligence, without the complex math and unnecessary jargon.

You’ll learn:

• The relationship between artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning
• The history behind AI and why the artificial intelligence revolution is happening now
• How decades of work in symbolic AI failed and opened the door for the emergence of neural networks
• What neural networks are, how they are trained, and why all the wonder of modern AI boils down to a simple, repeated unit that knows how to multiply input numbers to produce an output number.
• The implications of large language models, like ChatGPT and Bard, on our society—nothing will be the same again

AI isn’t magic. If you’ve ever wondered how it works, what it can do, or why there’s so much hype, How AI Works will teach you everything you want to know.