Zomalex | Data and AI Training

Before the course, please sign up to at least two of the following AI assistants: ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude and Gemini. These have both free (throttled in some way) and paid versions. In this course, the free version is sufficient for most tasks. These are all available using a browser - no installation is required. The registration page and details for each AI assistants are listed below.

You can use some of these tools without signing in but most AI assistants offer more features if you do sign in. For example, Copilot will remember your conversation history once signed in.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT

The official ChatGPT registration page is here. You can sign up in the usual way, using an email address or via a Google, Microsoft or Apple account. The page will look something like this.

Click on the “Sign up” button on the top right to see the “Create an account” page that will look like this.

Microsoft’s Copilot

You need to use the Microsoft browser Edge to make the best use of Copilot. Copilot comes in various versions:

the free (personal) version. The start page is at https://copilot.microsoft.com.
the paid (work/school) version. The start page is at https://m365.cloud.microsoft. Depending on your licenses, this version may have access to your work sources (documents on OneDrive, emails, etc). This is a very useful feature in general, but if available to you, take care not to show any confidential work information when presenting your screen during the course.

Copilot is also integrated into M365 applications like Teams, Outlook, Excel, Word and PowerPoint but the course does not cover this aspect of Copilot.

Anthropic’s Claude

The sign up page is here. You can sign in with an email address or a Google account.

Google’s Gemini

The sign up page is here. You will need a Google account – if you don’t already have one, you can create one for free.

Deepseek

The sign up page is here. Deepseek is interesting since it explains its reasoning, between </think> tags in the response, which allows us a perspective of what it is doing under the covers.

Other tools

Here a a few AI assistants recommended by attendees who have attended this course previously

NotebookLM from Google, “an AI-powered research and writing assistant that works best with the sources you upload”. It is particularly good at answering questions based solely on the content of a set of possibly large uploaded documents.
perplexity.ai since it prominently provides links and references to support the content of its responses.

These AI services all produce really great responses. The reason that attendees need to sign up to two services at least are:

the free versions of these tools may occasionally lock us out for a certain time period after we have used our quota of prompts. In that case we can simply switch to another service. (Note that the service may simply lock us out of using their latest and greatest version of the model but allow us to continue using the tool with an older version which for our purposes may work just as well.)
These AIs have a different set of capabilities and some tasks may not be possible in a particular AI. For example, we can provide a URL to ChatGPT and it will read the content of that web page, and any linked pages also if requested. However, at the current time of writing, September 2024, Claude cannot do this.
it is interesting to compare the responses of different AIs to the same prompt - where are they similar and where are they different?

Heads up: things may not work as planned

There are a few reasons why the course may encounter a few obstacles and we may need to work flexibly.

We are using the free versions of the AI assistants. These are not always available.
This is a fast-moving area – the tools are continuously changing and improving.
AI assistants are not by their nature deterministic. They will provide different responses to the same prompt for different users and for the same user at different times.

Some hints to make this particular course go well

engage actively both in the main room and the breakout rooms
when presenting: start from the beginning, explain in your own words and give people time
since this is a new course, I would be grateful if attendees could provide feedback at end of course (what went well, even better if,…)

GitHub Models

GitHub Models is a freemium service where we can try out new models with Python. You will need a free GitHub account.