Taking a leap towards AI on a leap year.

I am starting this blog on Feb 29th 2024, an interesting date on a leap year. My objective is to start on a journey on generative AI applications

I am finally embracing the reality of circumstances and my experiences in life. I am no longer trying to fix some old scars and I am not looking for the next big thing that I dream of becoming a golden ticket. If I learned anything in life, it is that growth is slow, growth needs consistent effort, and putting myself in a growing environment or area of knowledge is fundamental.

I actually worked on some foundational concepts of AI during my Masters 21 years ago when I had the opportunity to develop a prognostic model for vegetation phenology. I learned about supervised and unsupervised learning. I learned about cleaning up noisy data to pick trends. I also learned developing models to predict variables using input data. I did not have a good understanding of statistical and mathematical modeling at that time. 

Unfortunately, I dumbed myself down by giving up what I learned in my Masters with the hope of getting on a pathway for US citizenship that got me locked in as a corporate slave. Trying to fit in, trying to learn skills that I knew I was not good at was very painful. The only silver lining was becoming a stormwater modeller which made me feel like I was still somewhat in touch with what I learned and liked during my Masters. 17 years later I found myself completely lost and trying to find my way into IT because that's where I believe I can thrive. I wanted to build software applications.

I am tired though. I never met a person who could be my mentor, not a friend who I could share my thoughts and have intellectually stimulating conversation about engineering, or modeling. As time went by I found myself having shallow conversations and meeting people who had no interest in me.

Enough of this. Enough of looking back. Enough of regrets. Enough of wishing I would hit a lottery in my career that would take me to new height. I accept, that life is boring, that living a middle class life and making ends meet is a reality, that I have no control on many many things in life. 

All I could do is just find something interesting and learn. I just want to keep that interesting subject somewhat relevant with time and my work so that maybe I could find some friends to talk about these interesting topics. Maybe I could learn something at work related to it. That is all I am hoping for at this point.

So I found something interesting. Today I discovered, NVDIA's blog for developers. I learned what NVIDIA is doing to help towards Generative AI. That they have created guard rails to help Generative AI applications do not veer off into unwanted territory. Basically they have Topical, Safety, and Security guard rails. Here's the link I read ( https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-enables-trustworthy-safe-and-secure-large-language-model-conversational-systems/?ncid=prsy-552511#cid=dl28_prsy_en-us).

These guardrails are called NeMo guard rails. The name is interesting and I would like to know why they named it so. These guardrails ensure that some bad actors do not make the Generative AI application to behave in the way the creators do not expect them to provide. These guard rails were developed in Colang which I never heard of until today. Apparently there is a toolkit available for developing application with these gurad rails and there's a github page. I want to learn more. I want to understand how these guardrails are applied. More to share tomorrow and everyday from now on. Let's where I will be on this path 4 years from now in another leap year!