One of the things that always brings a smile to my face (and often a grimace, too) is the ability of the tech world to make something every day sound much more complicated (and often unpleasant) than it actually is.
One of my favourites is ‘boot up’ or ‘reboot’. Why we can’t just say ‘start’ or ‘switch on’ or ‘restart’ beats me.
Ingesting or uploading?
A new tech term (to me, at least) is ‘ingest’ or ‘ingested’ The standard usage, of course, is in a medical context, where you are describing the process of taking food into the body.
For some bizarre reason, this is the term that the AI tech bros have adopted to describe how files and documents are loaded into a custom GPT’s knowledge base. It’s language that fits the tech bill perfectly, I guess. It’s not every day. It sounds a bit technical/obscure. And honestly, for me, because of the medical association it sounds pretty unappealing.
On the flip side (and trying to be generous to the tech bros), there is some logic behind its use. The medical term, of course, is about the full consumption/digestion of something into something else – which is what the tech usage is getting at.
In other words, it’s about how fully and accurately a file or doc has been read and chunked by the knowledge base. If it hasn’t been fully ‘ingested’ this will lead to less-than-optimal output by the GPT.
But really, guys, couldn’t we just say, the files have or haven’t been accurately read and chunked?
Learning the lingo whether you like it or not
The annoying thing is that once these terms get introduced and adopted, you can write all the sniffy things you like about them in blog posts and articles and moan about them over a pint down the pub; but you are stuck with them. And (shudder,) eventually you find yourself using them.
I know it’s only a matter of time before I use the term because it will be a handy short hand that someone else understands or expects you to use. Or it’s short hand that you need to use to communicate effectively with someone more technical than you.
In short, you have to learn to speak the tech ‘lingo’; which is why, of course, this whole section of the diary is called, ‘Learning to speak API’. If you don’t learn the lingo, you’ll always struggle to communicate and to be taken seriously.
Anyway, on a more positive note, there is some pretty interesting and very important stuff I’ve been discovering, which sits behind the use of this unappealing term. I’ll surely be writing about this in future diary entries.
Until then…
