The AI and LLM Evolution

The AI tools you'll use in this course didn't appear out of nowhere. They're the result of decades of research, dead ends, and breakthroughs. Understanding this journey helps you appreciate what these tools can — and can't — do.

The Early Days: Rules and Logic

The first AI systems were rule-based. Programmers wrote explicit instructions: "If the user says X, respond with Y." These systems were brittle. They could only handle situations someone had anticipated.

Chess programs, early chatbots, expert systems — all ran on hand-coded rules. Impressive for their time, but fundamentally limited.

The Machine Learning Shift

In the 1990s and 2000s, a new approach emerged: instead of writing rules, let computers learn patterns from data. Feed a system thousands of examples, and it figures out the rules itself.

This worked remarkably well for specific tasks — spam detection, image recognition, recommendation engines. But each system was narrow. A spam detector couldn't recognize faces.

Deep Learning and Neural Networks

The 2010s brought deep learning: neural networks with many layers that could learn increasingly abstract patterns. Suddenly, AI could recognize speech, translate languages, and identify objects in photos with near-human accuracy.

But these systems still couldn't generate anything truly new. They could classify and predict, but not create.

Large Language Models: The Current Era

Then came LLMs — Large Language Models. Trained on vast amounts of text from the internet, these models learned something remarkable: the structure of language itself. And with language, they absorbed knowledge, reasoning patterns, and even coding ability.

GPT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA — these models can write essays, explain concepts, debug code, and build applications. They're not perfect. They make mistakes, hallucinate facts, and sometimes confidently produce nonsense. But they've fundamentally changed what's possible.

This is the technology powering your AI coding assistant. And you're learning to use it at exactly the right moment.