Me and ChromaDB - A Series Maybe... Part One - A.I. is Your Friend!

Hi Friends,

What's the first thing that comes to your mind when I say Artificial Intelligence(AI)?

HAL 9000

The WOPR

Skynet

Personally I prefer:

Wall-E

V.I.N.CENT

TARS

As with everything humans create, AI is a REALLY cool tool and it can be helpful or it can be harmful.  I love technology and I'm hoping that AI will work with humans as a partner and hopefully AI will have fewer bugs in it's code than we have in ours.

But before I bow down to my new robot rulers, let's talk about where things are right now in this fast moving technology that has a lot of us scratching our heads as to what it even is.  

In the past I've done research on machine learning and finding patterns in data, but Large Language Models(LLM) databases are REALLY cool! 

If you're a total newb like me, take a look at this AWESOME video:

https://youtu.be/2IK3DFHRFfw?si=Ar1ttKfs7kxOAV_7

The author of the video is outstanding explaining some very difficult concepts into terms that made a lot of sense.

Computers are basically really powerful calculators and they do a fantastic job crunching numbers. The folks that make these databases feed the AI tons of text, images and writing examples that are translated into numbers.  The LLM starts to see patterns in the text and images and begins playing, What's The Next Word game.

For example we can start something like, "A cat is a <blank>." and we go from there.  A cat is an animal.  A cat is an animal with four legs.  A cat is an animal with four legs and whiskers.  And on and on.  The more information you feed your LLM the better it will be at answering your questions, but you have to remember that your LLM will only be as smart as it's data AND the questions it's being asked.

Soooooo I decided it was time for me to install one of these REALLY cool databases and find out how they work and how I'm going to back it up.  I decided to go with ChromaDB, it's open-source and look how easy the install instructions are:

pip install chromadb

That's it?!  Well sheesh, I can do that!  Wait, what's PIP?  Isn't it that thing you get put on when you're doing a bad job at work?  

Will Neil be able to figure out what the mysterious PIP tool is?  Can he get ChromaDB installed on his Ubuntu box??  All these questions and more will be answered in the next chapter of Me and ChromaDB!!