Recommended Readings
Because of my well known enthusiasm for AI tools, I was asked to share my knowledge with incoming PhD students as part of our department’s new student orientation activities. That resulted in the creation of a guide on using AI tools for PhD students, which I share here with you. Given the rapidly evolving AI landscape, I wrote the guide (and contemporaneous presentation) in terms of first principles, rather than making specific tool recommendations (although I did that too). While the tools I mentioned in the guide (written in August 2023) are probably out of date already, with its conversational tone, I expect that it continues to be useful for those who are interested in learning about generative AI tools, specifically large language models.
While my guide also shares some links, including a link to a YouTube playlist that I made for our PhD students, below is a running list of resources that Chat-Lab.AI users will hopefully find useful. I will continue updating these links going forward.
Introduction to LLMs
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What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?: An excellent, accessible explanation of how LLMs like ChatGPT work. The discussion in my ChatGPT guide is largely based on this explanation.
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What is an LLM? A Guide on Large Language Models and How They Work
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8 Top Open-Source LLMs for 2024 and Their Uses: Learn about open source alternatives to OpenAI’s private LLMs.
Using LLMs in Academic Workflows
Prompt Engineering
Information Retrieval
- What is Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)?
- OpenAI Assistants API Tutorial: A tutorial on using the Assistants API. It’s more code-based, but you don’t need to know Python to benefit from this tutorial, which explains what’s going on under the hood with these custom assistants.