Intent Driven AI for Non-Engineers

People speak about intent-driven AI but what is the big deal?

I try to explain for non-engineers, let me know how I do.

TL;DR: It is not about what you say, it is about what you no longer have to say.

What is intent? The word puzzle

I am playing a word game. I have one word remaining and I cannot guess what the word is. I decide to "get help" (otherwise known as "cheating"). My first emotion is to ask Google the following

Find me a 6 letter word where the 4th letter is an "I" using the following 6 letters - "A, I, S, C, N, O".

Here is the response

It does not give me an answer.

Interestingly I did not do this.

Instead, I first uploaded a screenshot of the game to ChatGTP and asked the question

What is the 6 letter word?

And it answered - "CASINO".

A big deal!

I look at this and I am astonished. I am a software engineer by birth. How would I traditionally code for a computer to understand this?

Consider what the computer needs to understand:

1. This is an image containing a word puzzle
2. Letters are being filled in the boxes in the image
3. Where letters are shared, they have to work for all words they are shared with
4. There is a circle at the bottom
5. In the circle, there are 6 circles with a letter in each
6. The letters in the circle are the letters I can use to fill the boxes.
7. There is one row of boxes that do not have letters
8. The 4th letter is a shared box containing the letter "I".
9. Therefore I need to find a word of length 6 letters where the 4th letter is an "I" and I can only use the letters "A, I, S, C, N, O".
10. Return me a word that works

I did not give ChatGTP any of this. Instead, all I said was

What is the 6 letter word?

And it gave me the right answer

CASINO

That is the difference between intent-based interactions and action interactions. ChatGTP understands what it is looking at and can answer questions intelligently. To date, we have been trained to do action interactions with machines because they do not understand such a higher-level context.

Now they do and that changes everything.

My first thought was to try ChatGTP rather than Google which is very bad for Google. We use Google a huge amount to answer intent-based questions, but we do not ask Google intent-based questions, we ask Google questions after we have processed the intent into a statement we believe Google will understand.

The amount we search on Google is decreasing.

A blank puzzle, an open question

Next, I started a new game with no words completed. I uploaded the blank puzzle to ChatGTP and asked the question:

Complete this puzzle

And it did.

In addition to all the above understanding, ChatGTP needs to understand that it is looking at a word puzzle where the task (or intent) is to fill all the boxes using the letters in the circles at the bottom and where shared boxes need to have letters shared by all words involved.

Two entities exist on the planet that can do this

1. Humans
2. Generative AI

Five years ago there was one. This is why this is a big deal.

I asked ChatGTP some additional questions

ChatGTP has not "seen" this specific puzzle before but it understands the general concept of grid-based word puzzle games, it can extrapolate the likely gameplay from the screenshot and it can correctly solve the puzzle.

Is ChatGTP displaying intuition?

Is ChatGTP doing what humans do? I also had not seen this game before the first I played it. Yet I used the same logic ChatGTP did.

And to complete the conversation...

So what...

When we work, we spend our whole time trying to solve puzzles. The difference is that these are business-related puzzles. And we translate our true intent into questions we can get answered from our traditional systems.

Example procedural questions: What is the status of base station X, what are all the alarms in region Y? Is there any maintenance work currently in region Z?

We ask these questions to try and get an answer for our true intent: Why does this customer have a problem?

Or: What do I need to do to increase our number of customers by 10% in the next quarter?

The whole conversation can change from saying what we need to do to asking what we are trying to achieve.

In conclusion

Two entities exist on the planet that can do this

1. Humans
2. Generative AI

Five years ago there was one. This is why this is a big deal.

Would anyone like to post how it does it?

Then it will save me from writing the next article...