The enthusiasm around AI has been focused on large language models for years now. For quite a few folks, this is their first real experience with AI at all. And I am sure you have noticed something:

LLMs are non-deterministic.

In other words, repeated invocations of the algorithm with the same inputs typically produces different outputs.

You can demonstrate this yourself. Open a chat AI tool in two incognito tabs, asking it a substantial prompt like "explain LLMs to me", and you will see the responses are different.

With all the noise about generative AI like this in the past 5 years, it's easy to forget there is a whole universe of AI that is completely deterministic.

The simplest example is linear regression.

Lots of great info about this online, so I will not explain it here. But when someone asked me recently how to start learning AI - not just how to use AI tools, but actually understand AI from first principles - my suggestion was that he start by learning linear regression.…