Artificial Intelligence

Not long ago, artificial intelligence had a memory problem. It could translate a phrase or predict the next word, but it often forgot what came before. Early language models worked in fragments, seeing words one at a time without really understanding how they connected. Then, in 2017, a group of researchers at Google published a paper called Attention Is All You Need. That simple phrase ended up transforming the entire field of AI. It introduced a new type of model called the Transformer, and it changed how machines understand language, images, and even code. 

AI in production isn’t just about the model itself. It’s about the pipeline that surrounds it: the flow of data, the automation that prepares and validates it, the systems that monitor predictions and catch errors before they spiral. Without a robust pipeline, even the most advanced model is little more than a lab experiment. 

In the world of artificial intelligence, bigger often seems better. Every few months, we hear about a new model with more parameters, more training data, and more impressive benchmarks. From GPT-style large language models to advanced vision architectures, the race to scale AI systems shows no signs of slowing down. But while increasing model size can boost performance, it’s not a free upgrade. Larger models come with trade-offs in efficiency, cost, and even accessibility. Understanding how scaling impacts each of these areas is important for anyone building, deploying, or managing AI systems. 

When people talk about machine learning, the spotlight usually lands on the model. Whether it’s the neural network, algorithm, or architecture. But behind every great model is something far less glamorous and far more important: the data it learns from. And not just the data itself, but how that data is represented.

Neural networks are powerful, but they’re also prone to a classic problem: overfitting. When a model performs perfectly on its training data but fails to generalize to new, unseen data, it’s not really learning; it’s memorizing. In real-world applications, that’s a big issue. To address this, researchers have developed several regularization techniques that help models learn patterns instead of noise. One of the most effective and widely used options is dropout. It’s simple, elegant, and surprisingly powerful. 

When most people think about training artificial intelligence, they think of massive datasets that need to be labeled. It could be thousands of annotated images, carefully tagged text, or structured tables telling the model exactly what each piece of data represents. But labeling data like this is expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes downright impossible. That’s where self-supervised learning comes in.