Remember the first time you typed a question into ChatGPT and it responded with an answer so clear it seemed like a human wrote it? This was an eye-opening moment. This ability to understand and generate language was vastly more effective than anything we'd seen before.

This breakthrough in language understanding propelled ChatGPT to an unprecedented 100 million users in just two months, the fastest adoption of any application in history.

This language understanding is fueling a change in human-computer interaction, powering everything from chatbots to AI Agents. It's why Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says, 'Human language is the new UI layer.' But how is this possible?

But how is this possible?

This talk will give you a practical look at how human language can be converted into a mathematical representation. We'll develop an intuitive understanding, starting with a brief introduction to tokens and embedding models. This will build to the idea of "semantic" representation, which is a core concept. We won't go deep on the math, but rather we’ll focus on how vectors are used to represent the meaning of words and how we can calculate the similarity between them.

From Theory to Practice: Language Understanding in Action

Though language understanding is also part of Large Language Models (LLMs), we will see semantic representation isolated in a purpose-built web app that lets you interactively compare text snippets side-by-side to see their semantic similarity. You'll be able to try it yourself and see how it works across different human languages and even programming languages.

Then we'll take a peek inside Microsoft AI Foundry to show an example of where you can find the technology used by the web app.

We’ll close by connecting the dots to other popular AI and AI-adjacent technologies like semantic search, vector databases, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), coding assistants, and even the humble chatbot. Don’t worry if any of these terms are unfamiliar. We’ll focus on how the language understanding piece is relevant. This can help you appreciate when these other technologies might be useful.

Target Audience

This talk is for any curious student. If you've used ChatGPT (or a similar tool), you're ready for this talk; no other technical background is required.

Takeaways

You'll walk away with a clearer idea of how human language can be the new UI layer and how you can make use of that understanding.

Student-targeted version