Data Fundamentals

Generative AI is the market's name for models whose output is a piece of content, such as text, images, audio, video or code, as opposed to the much larger body of models that sort, score or forecast things that already exist.

Large language models are neural networks trained on a vast quantity of written text to predict the piece of text that comes next, an objective narrow enough to state in a line and broad enough to yield writing, translation, code and summary as side effects.

A transformer is a neural-network design that takes a whole sequence in at once and, for every element in it, works out how strongly each of the other elements should influence that one.

Data analysis is the practice of interrogating data to answer a specific question, and of establishing how much weight the answer can bear.

Data wrangling is the work of repairing and reshaping real records, and of deciding what their gaps and inconsistencies mean, until a table can be trusted with the question being asked of it.

Data visualisation is the practice of encoding numbers as position, length and colour so that a comparison a reader would otherwise have to calculate becomes something they can simply see.