Slm

The other day found me chatting about AI developments with my mate Dr Baz Broxtowe of Fradley University. We met up at a service area on the M1 motorway because Dr Baz was on his way to an artificial intelligence conference up north somewhere.

It was noisy because lots of kids were obviously off school for half-term or something, but we found a table where Dr Baz was able to outline some recent AI developments in the political field.

“As you probably know, it’s all about language,” said Dr Baz when I finally managed to grab a couple of coffees and work my way back to the table without scalding one of the kids rushing around the place.

“AI systems are essentially Large Language Models or LLMs,” he continued, somehow managing to raise his voice over a nearby argument about doughnuts. “They use complex mathematical algorithms to learn appropriate linguistic responses by being trained on vast inputs of language already in use.”

“Okay I get that,” I replied, “apart from the maths and computing involved I can see how it works in a very, very general sense.”

“In that case you will understand why political parties are interested in it,” Dr Baz continued.

“Boost the apparent intellectual quality of their candidates?”

“Essentially yes. They are interested in the possibility of a kind of dynamic autocue where an AI system is able to formulate responses dynamically even when picking up verbal questions from a live audience. These responses would be piped to the candidate through an autocue.”

“What about when they are out and about canvassing and so on?”

“This is the interesting aspect, the AI system would pick up, say a journalist’s question or maybe a question from the public and it would pipe a response onto the candidates earpiece.”

“To a lay person that sounds tricky,” I replied.

“It is tricky, and that’s why the Greens have gone for a different approach.”

“How different?”

“Instead of AI based on a Large Language Model, they have gone for an Small Language Model or SLM as we call it. As they say much the same thing to any question, they think an SLM with do well enough. Really it’s just a collection of what we call eco-phrases, but they seem happy with it.”

“Interesting.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Dr Baz replied as he sipped his coffee.