Introduction to Generative AI

In the fall of 1989, the first year of our bachelor’s degree program, a student asked the professor, “So, do you feed this flowchart to the computer and then it generates code?” The professor had this strange look and responded, “No, you need to develop the code, compile, and run it.” Getting a computer to generate code using a flowchart was a silly thought or a brilliant thought at the time depending on how you look at it. Here we are, thirty or so years later: it is not only possible to generate code with simple natural language instructions but also possible to convert code from one language into another! And this is possible with Generative AI (GenAI)!