Excellent posts JBMcB!! here and above. Of all the explanations of how a neural network AI works your is #3 above is the clearest and most succinct.

Quote Originally Posted by JBMcB View Post
Want the full explanation?
The breakthrough came with GPUs, which came into prominence about fifteen years ago. These are high-end video cards with the video bit stripped out. They contain thousands of simple processors dedicated to doing matrix operations, which are critical for fancy video game graphics, and coincidentally very good at doing tensor calculations needed for neural networks....
^Indeed. Anyone following the stock of late will know the greatest driver on Wall Street has been Nvidia, a company that rose by creating GPU's for computer gaming. With the consequence of GPU's being adaptable for AI, Nvidia now has a virtual monopoly on them for provisioning the AI revolution. And their stock has gone out the roof. So important are their GPU chips that the US government bans export of their highest end chips to adversaries, China in particular.

Quote Originally Posted by JBMcB View Post
The other half of the equation is that you can go out and buy a high-end consumer graphics card for around $1,000 and run small versions of these models yourself. This gets a *lot* more developers working on this stuff. You used to need a low level supercomputer to do basic, semi-useful neural networking experiments. Now you can buy a machine at best buy and do much, much more than that.
On this front I, and I'm guessing you too JBMcB, am following the efforts toward creating personal agents, AI's that will be based on our private home computer systems that will serve as our own personal butlers, independent of and protected from internet based AI's and networks.

I've seen where there are many instances of open-source AI's being offered by Meta, Google and others. Right now it takes some heavy hardware but the coding is becoming leaner and cleaner to the point where we will all have the option of our own personal AI's. "AI, go through my email archives and Quickbooks for the past five years with Company XYZ and create a new product proposal with cost analysis..."

Thoughts?