3 Key Concepts Driving Modern AI Innovation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly evolving field with many moving parts. To understand modern AI, it helps to focus on three foundational building blocks:

1. Large Language Models (LLMs):

LLMs are the powerful engines behind many AI applications. They process and generate human-like language, enabling AI to understand, respond, and create text in a way that feels natural and intuitive.

2. AI Workflows:

Integrating AI into our daily workflows is essential to harness its full potential. This means using AI as a smart assistant by providing clear, specific instructions—known as prompts—to guide its actions effectively. Successful AI workflows blend human expertise with AI capabilities.

3. AI Agents:

AI agents are autonomous systems that can independently determine how to achieve goals. These “thinking” AI entities represent a new kind of workforce that could operate alongside humans, tackling complex tasks with minimal supervision.

Together, these concepts form the foundation of today’s AI landscape and hint at the transformative possibilities ahead.

Here is a link to this infographic created using Google’s Gemini.

Forays int AI:

1. I started by asking Google Gemini to describe the basic AI workflow
2. One of the resources it found was a Youtube video by Codemify “AI Agents, AI Workflow – Explained” which made some very interesting points.
3. I brought this video into Google NotebookLM as a Source and used the Studio / Notes to create a Briefing Doc of its content.
4. I copied the Briefing Note contents to the clipboard and returned to Google Gemini Canvas where I asked it to “Prepare a brief infographic summarizing the following content: [pasted the Briefing Note contents]” Gemini responded with a brief infographic summarizing the key concepts from the document. I asked Gemini to make it visually interesting and add the footnote acknowledging the adaptation from the original video source.
5. I drafted an introduction to this post and asked Perplexity AI, a popular LLM based search engine to critique and make suggestions. (I had used up my Google Gemini tokens for the day!) I adopted Perplexity’s suggestions including a more engaging title.

Here is my first draft for comparison:

3 Key Concepts in Modern AI

Artificial intelligence, AI, is a fast moving topic with lots of evolving parts. Three key building blocks in modern AI are:

1. LLMs – Large Language Models are the brains behind AI
2. AI Workflows – Learning how to integrate AI workflows with our workflows is the recipe for using AI today This means using AI as a powerful assistant and providing it with clear and specific instructions (prompts) to follow.
3. AI Agents – An AI that can figure out the “how” to achieve a goal on its own. These autonomous thinkers may become a powerful parallel workforce of the future.