A Guide to AI at VCU

Academic Affairs

AI for All: AI for the Public Good at VCU

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay, and if you’re not learning about these powerful tools today, you’re already a step behind. AI blends technology, science, and creativity with boundless possibilities.

This website is meant to be a resource to the VCU community to help you to explore the world of AI as you navigate your learning journey here at VCU. We want you to envision a future where AI isn't just a buzzword, it's a door into adventure and innovation.

At VCU, you can get involved in AI, and more specifically, Generative AI, in many different ways - from joining student organizations focused on artificial intelligence, to testing it out as a productivity tool, to enrolling in courses that can lead towards a certificate, minor or degree.

So what is AI?

AI is all about creating computer programs that can think, learn, and make decisions much like humans. Think of it as a whole toolbox of technologies working together to mimic human intelligence – from robotics to natural language processing to image recognition. And, amidst all this, there's a particular aspect of AI that's stealing the spotlight: 'Generative AI'.

I bet you've seen a lot of acronyms related to AI and you're asking -  how are they related to Generative AI?

Good question. Let's scroll and explore.

 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a broad field of computer science aimed at creating machines capable of intelligent behavior.
For example, when Netflix recommends a movie or our email filters out spam or your credit card company detects a fraud transaction, that's AI working for us.
But for most of us it was only after Microsoft’s $1 billion investment in the company “OpenAI” made headlines in 2019 that fired up the interest in the topic.
Machine Learning (ML) is a subset of AI focused on enabling machines to learn from structured data and improve performance over time without being explicitly programmed.
Inspired from the structure and function of the human brain, Deep Learning is a subset of ML that can work with unstructured data to generate artificial neural networks with many layers (hence "deep") to learn patterns from data. It has revolutionized areas like image and speech recognition.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are built using deep learning techniques, specifically neural networks with multiple layers. Generative AI tools are then trained on Large Language Models (LLMs) and use LLMs as part of their architecture or framework. Notice some popular ones from OpenAI (GPT-4), Google (Gemini), Anthropic (Claude 3)
Generative AI (GenAI) is a subset of AI that focuses on creating novel content, like text, images, code, music, video, etc. It uses both Machine Learning and Deep Learning to understand what it needs to do and then it generates a new, complex output.
Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) - where machines achieve human-like intelligence is currently only a theoretical concept. However, many scientists are speculating that we could see it in less than 10 years.