Our speaker this month was Prof. Chris Watkins from the Computer Science Dept. at Royal Holloway University of London.

Chris explained about the origins of large language models and how exceptions in the rules of grammar had been largely overcome by transforming text into vectors which enables machine processing.  We learnt how AI has evolved to cope with the occasional ambiguities in language using a Times headline “Hospitals named after sandwiches kill five” as an example.

Amongst non-technical aspects covered were problems in determining whether intellectual papers were actually original rather than AI generated, infringement of copyright and fake news.