AI for Everybody - Lesson 4
What Is This Thing? The Three Ingredients: Data, Compute, Algorithms
Last week we walked the seventy-year history. Each winter happened in part since one ingredient was missing. Each renaissance happened in part since all three lined up at once. This week we name the ingredients.
There are three of them. Data. Compute. Algorithms. Every AI system you have ever used was built from those three things. Every wave you read about in Lesson 3, including the wave we are currently in, came from a moment when all three were available at the same time at the right scale. Holding onto the recipe gives you a clean way to evaluate any AI claim for the rest of the course.
I will walk through them in the order they tend to appear in a typical project: first the data, then the compute that trains a model on the data, then the algorithm that says what kind of model gets built. Most popular coverage gets the order backward. Most working researchers do not.
