Day: August 31, 2023

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Journey of AI to Generative AI and How It Works

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In the last few years, cutting-edge technologies and services have drastically changed their directions, dynamics, and use cases. It is quite evident that the recent wave of global technology adoption by industries is overwhelmed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its various flavors.  AI is becoming increasingly woven into the fabric of our everyday lives, changing the way we live and work. This article discusses the basics of AI/ML, its usage, the evolution of Generative AI, Prompt Engineering, and LangChain.

What Are AI and ML?

AI is the capability of simulating human intelligence and thought processes such as learning and problem-solving. It can perform complex tasks that historically could only be done by humans. Through AI, a non-human system uses mathematical and logical approaches to simulate the reasoning that people use for learning new information and making decisions.

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Time-Travel Debugging Production Code

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Normally, when we use debuggers, we set a breakpoint on a line of code, we run our code, execution pauses on our breakpoint, we look at values of variables, and maybe the call stack, and then we manually step forward through our code's execution. In time-travel debugging, also known as reverse debugging, we can step backward as well as forward. This is powerful because debugging is an exercise in figuring out what happened: traditional debuggers are good at telling you what your program is doing right now, whereas time-travel debuggers let you see what happened. You can wind back to any line of code that is executed and see the full program state at any point in your program’s history.

History and Current State

It all started with Smalltalk-76, developed in 1976 at Xerox PARC.  It had the ability to retrospectively inspect checkpointed places in execution. Around 1980, MIT added a "retrograde motion" command to its DDT debugger, which gave a limited ability to move backward through execution. In a 1995 paper, MIT researchers released ZStep 95, the first true reverse debugger, which recorded all operations as they were performed and supported stepping backward, reverting the system to the previous state. However, it was a research tool and not widely adopted outside academia.