A quick look at artificial intelligence

We’ll look at one more technology that doesn’t fit in any other category and is starting to have an impact on the geospatial industry: artificial intelligence or AI. AI refers to a category of technology based on machine learning techniques and robust datasets to solve problems, which can include geospatial problems. One particular form of this technology that has received a lot of attention is large language models (LLMs). An LLM is software trained on a very large body of text and uses statistical prediction to generate human-like text responses to questions or statements. The LLM that has received the most attention so far is called ChatGPT. ChatGPT can generate human-like narratives, but notably, it can also generate code. It was trained by reading a large portion of the internet, including lots of Python code and geospatial knowledge. That means we can use ChatGPT to generate geospatial Python code almost automatically. There...