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Artificial intelligence: 5 questions answered that you should know

What actually is a neural network and are AIs conscious? Here are five important questions about artificial intelligence answered

By Matthew Sparkes

18 April 2023

Prompt: 2 sad cats reading a newspaper in a Wes Anderson film

Images of cats reading created by generative AI tool Midjourney

Tim Boddy/Midjourney

The field of artificial intelligence has had many spurts of progress since it began in earnest in 1950, and also long periods of stagnation and pessimism. But in recent years we have seen the pace of research accelerate to surprising speed.

Large language models like GPT-4 have passed parts of the US Medical Licensing Examination, the Multistate Bar Examination and a test given to coding job candidates at Amazon. Image-generation models such as Midjourney are creating photorealistic images of famous …

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