AI is misunderstood. A lot of people talk about AI, but I haven’t heard anyone talk about what artificial intelligence really is. So, let’s fix that, at least for authors turned entrepreneurs.

I am a physicist and have multiple engineering degrees, including a doctorate. There was an opportunity from a U.S. Air Force initiative to write a funding proposal for a project that included an AI component.

All of us in flight safety, nationwide, got together to write that proposal. I wrote the AI section because my company was a leader in that field. Long story short, we were successfully funded with several million dollars for a five-year project.

But the pandemic hit in the first year, and combined with the huge Boeing mess, 1 in 3 of my coworkers and I were laid off. Being the Ph.D. in the building, I saw the layoffs coming three years in advance.

So, when I was asked to head up the USAF project, which included that AI component, I declined because I wanted the project to succeed without me. So, the project continued without too much of a hit.

Anyway, I learned a lot about AI in that first year. The part you should know about is data ponds, lakes, and oceans. An artificial intelligence is a neural network, like your brain.

It starts small, like a child’s brain rather than an adult’s, and grows by being fed data. Lots and lots of data.

The internet is filled with the written word. That is a massive data ocean that an AI neural network can use to grow and learn. The internet is also filled with videos, another data ocean that an AI neural network can grow on.

Most of the AI products you’ve been told about use these two data oceans. It’s called Generative AI.

Other types of AI neural networks use other data ponds and lakes. My aerospace AI project used proprietary inspection data that was not uploaded to the internet.

Yes, it was stored on a computer, but that computer wasn’t connected to the internet, so its contents weren’t shared with the world. Why not? Because it was protected for business reasons.

My point is, only information freely available on the internet can be used by an AI to grow its neural network. It can’t use the dark web. What is the dark web? It sounds sinister, but the dark web is anything on the internet not open to everyone. For example, your bank’s sign-in page is not on the dark web, because it can be seen by all, but everything you see after signing in IS on the dark web.

In my advanced course for my last business, I was asked if what I was sharing was information available on the dark web. I said yes, it was, right now, here in this class, because the course was behind a payment wall. As you might imagine, conspiracy theorists in the class don’t like that answer. But it’s still true.

So, when looking at AI solutions, ask yourself how the AI being marketed to you grew its neural network. What data was used? Was there a lot or only a little? Because only a little means the AI is weak or perhaps even useless.

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