TEACHING GRANDMA AI: FOREWORD

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FOREWORD

Following the release of ChatGPT in 2022, AI quickly became a household name. Back then, I was working as a full-time software engineer, and I had very little time outside of work to keep up with the rapidly evolving AI space. Regardless, I made it an objective to master AI by the end of the year. You know, “aim for the sky, and if you fall, you land on the moon” kinda vibes.  Brothers and Sisters, I didn't even make it to the atmosphere, let alone get to the moon. 😭

ISSUES WITH LEARNING AI

After deep introspection, I found the root causes of my struggle. The 3 main reasons are outlined below: 

1. AI papers are way too technical

While many influential AI papers are publicly available,  they are usually written by PhD-level researchers. And for some reason, the authors assume everyone has the same qualifications.

These papers often require you to be up-to-date on your calculus, statistics, vectors, and algebra. (Well…I guess we are not their target market.)

A renowned paper on AI

2. Lack of comprehensive and beginner-friendly AI resources

Find a resource that was both complete and easy-to-digest resource was like finding a needle in a haystack. Books on AI were 500+ pages long and assumed you had a prerequisite in maths and statistics. The situation was not better on YouTube. Most of the videos on AI were highly specialized, or creators were releasing very shallow content just to chase trends for views. 

However, there were a few resources that genuinely helped me at the start of my AI journey. I will share them with you in subsequent sections. 

3. Not everyone has time to read a 500-page AI book.

-Time is always a scarce commodity in our fast-paced world. Let’s be honest, most of us claim to work from 9 am to 5 pm, when in reality it’s really 6 am to 6 pm. If you factor in the time it takes to get ready for work, and commute time. 

Despite this, I committed to studying AI for two hours every day after work. This was challenging, exhausting, and took me longer than expected to finally catch up with AI.

THE NEED FOR THE “TEACHING GRANDMA AI" BOOK

At this point, it became clear that there was a real need for simple, intuitive explainer content for people who want to know how AI works without reading a 500+ page book or taking a 4-week course on AI.  So I took it upon myself to solve that problem. 

Hear me out, if I, a professional engineer with my background in mathematics, statistics,  and computer science, struggled at first to get the intuition, then what about a non-technical person? 

I then challenged myself to take this project one step further. To explain AI in a way my Grandma could understand.

WHAT IS THE “TEACHING GRANDMA AI” BOOK

 

Teaching Grand AI is the culmination of my years of studying AI, summarized and distilled into easy-to-read chapters. This is suitable for:

  •  Absolute beginners who want to truly understand AI without the hype, 
  • Professionals who want a solid recap (And maybe even learn something new)

CHAPTERS COVERED IN THIS BOOK

  1. Teaching Grandma the Meaning of AI
  2. Teaching Grandma the History of AI
  3. Teaching Grandma Machine Learning
  4. Types of Machine Learning
  5. Teaching Grandma Classical Machine Learning Algorithms
  6. Teaching Grandma the Meaning of Neural Networks
  7. Teaching Grandma Neural Network Architectures
  8. Teaching Grandma Large Language Models (LLMs)
  9. Teaching Grandma Generative AI
  10. Teaching Grandma AI Engineering
  11. Teaching Grandma AI Ethics
  12. Bringing It All Together: The AI Stack

HONORABLE MENTION OF SOME BEGINNER-FRIENDLY AI RESOURCES

Some helpful resources that helped me early in my AI journey

 

I am a writer who writes about life lessons  and technology. Check out my latest book “TEACHING GRANDMA AI” on Amazon/ Selar/ Lulu.

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