Learning AI without tears

If all the hype about artificial intelligence (AI) is giving you sleepless nights because you feel clueless and unprepared, pick up a copy of Jaspreet Bindra and Anuj Magazine's book Winning with AI: Your Guide to AI Literacy.

- CHINTAN GIRISH MODI

Written for beginners, it covers the basics so quickly and effortlessly that you might wonder why it took you so long to get started. It also helps readers wrap their head around jargon such as machine learning, natural language processing, large language models, computer vision, tokens, sessions, prompts, and agents, among other terms.

Jaspreet Bindra is the co-founder and chief executive officer of AI&Beyond, a company that employs human beings as well as AI agents to build "AI literacy" in organisations. Anuj Magazine is the cofounder and chief technology officer of the same company. They write from a wealth of experience in the corporate sector. The former has worked at Microsoft, the Mahindra Group and Tata Administrative Services. The latter has worked at Walmart, Citrix, McAfee and Quark.

What does "AI literacy" mean? Defining it seems to be an important task because words such as "emotional literacy", "financial literacy", "digital literacy" and "media literacy" have been in circulation for a while, and one no longer associates literacy only with the ability to read and write. According to this book, literacy involves learning the "patterns, structures and grammar" of a language so that one can build on these to "read a story, write a poem or make sense of your bills".