It is possible that when the foundations were laid for the first cathedral people pondered what was to come. Once complete, mankind’s place in the universe started to change. Perhaps a step in the metaphysical journey between worship and creation that blurring the pre-existing lines.

A similar journey is now underway with artificial intelligence, are we the creator and if so, can we create something greater than ourselves? How does this change our current understanding of the universe?

Perhaps this is a valid starting point for our journey, first looking at the bigger picture and then focusing in on our current work. Lufkins AI and Robotics specialises in the exploitation of three main areas of artificial intelligence:

• Language Models (LLMs), these are general purpose models that that have been trained on immense quantities of facts and data. LLMs typically understand natural language and can perform many tasks beyond the simple question/answer scenarios that most people are already familiar with.
  
  
• Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), think of RAG as providing a link to information that was not included in the initial training of the LLM. This allows specialist knowledge to be accessed, or current events that had not yet occurred at the time of training.
  
  
• Voice Recognition, being able to interact with artificial intelligence through a conversational approach opens up many new possibilities. This approach also provides a more humanistic interface between the user and the machine which helps reduce the complexity.

While this technology has previously required Cloud scale resources for efficient operation, it is now possible to run from a reasonably specified desktop PC.