The launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022 marked a milestone in the evolution of computing. Generative AI, a term that was previously confined to academicians, researchers and senior data scientists, instantly became a buzzword. The developers of this technology made artificial intelligence ubiquitous by making the technology easier to understand and bringing it closer to consumers.
Artificial intelligence is typically used to perform predictions or classifications, such as identifying an image of an animal as a dog or cat or detecting if a credit card transaction is genuine or fraudulent. Generative AI aims at creating new content in the form of text, images or audio based on foundation models that are trained on vast datasets available in the public domain.
Foundation models such as large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models are already powering some of the most popular tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, which are used to produce content based on a simple textual prompt.
Code models are specialized language models trained specifically to understand, generate, interpret and sometimes execute code. Code foundation models are trained on vast datasets made up of code from a variety of programming languages, libraries and frameworks, collected from public repositories and other sources.