Tell me about the Makerspace project and how it came to be? “The Makerspace is really the vision of our dean, Raheem Beyah, and the school chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Arijit Raychowdhury, who really wanted to put AI in the hands of our students.

“In 2024 — in the post ChatGPT world — things are very different from the pre-ChatGPT world. We need a lot of computing power to do anything that’s meaningful and relevant to industry. And in a way, the devil is out of the box. People see what AI can do. But I think to get to that level of training, you need infrastructure.

“The name Makerspace also comes from this culture we have at Georgia Tech of these maker spaces, which are places where our students get to tinker, both within the classroom and outside the classroom. The Makerspace was the idea to bring the tools that you need to do AI in a way that’s relevant to do meaningful things today. So, right now, where we’re at is we’ve partnered Nvidia to essentially offer to students a supercomputer. I mean, that’s what it is.

“What makes it unique is that it’s meant for supporting students. And right now it’s in the classroom. We’re still rolling it out. We’re in phase one. So, the idea is that the students in the classroom can work on AI projects that are meaningful to industry — problems that are interesting, you know, from a pedagogical perspective, but they don’t mean a whole lot in an industry setting.”

Tell me a bit about the projects they’ve been working on with this. “I can give you a very concrete example. ChatGPT is a very typical, a very specific form of AI called generative AI. You know, it’s able to generate. In the case of ChatGPT, [that means] text in response to prompts. You might have seen a generative model that generates pictures. I think these were very popular and whatnot. And so these are the kind of things our students can do right now, …generate anything that would be, say, photo realistic.

“You need a pretty hefty computing power to train your model and then test that it’s working properly. And so that’s what our students can do. Just to give you an idea of how far we’ve come along, before we had the AI Makerspace, our students were relying largely on something called Google CoLab. CoLab is Google making some compute resources freely accessible for use. They’re really giving to us the resources they don’t use or don’t sell to their be clients. So it’s like the crumbs that remain.

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia voters are beginning to have their say on party primary races and nonpartisan judicial elections.

Three weeks of early in-person voting is set to begin Monday ahead of the May 21 election, when parties will choose their nominees for congressional and state legislative seats, as well as for local races including sheriffs, district attorneys and county commissioners.

May 21 also is the general election for judicial candidates, who run on a nonpartisan basis.

Mail-in ballots were sent last week to those who had requested them, while people can continue to request a mail ballot through May 10.

Among the top races are a state supreme court race between incumbent Justice Andrew Pinson and challenger John Barrow and primaries in the 3rd Congressional District, where incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Drew Ferguson is stepping down.

Runoffs will be held June 18 in races where candidates don’t win a majority in May.

Here’s a look at the election and some top races:

CONGRESSIONAL SHOWDOWN

Six Republicans are seeking their party’s nomination to succeed Ferguson in a district that runs along the Alabama border from Carrollton to Columbus and swings east into the Atlanta suburbs around Peachtree City and Fayetteville.

Former President Donald Trump has endorsed his onetime aide Brian Jack for the seat. Also seeking the nomination are former state Sens. Mike Crane and Mike Dugan, former state Rep. Philip Singleton, Jim Bennett and Ray Blair.

On the Democratic side, Val Almonord and Maura Keller are seeking their party’s nomination in the heavily GOP district.

STATE SUPREME COURT

The May 21 vote is the general election for judicial candidates, who run without party labels.

Incumbent Justice Andrew Pinson, who was appointed to the court by Gov. Brian Kemp in 2022, is trying to win a six-year term. He is opposed by John Barrow, a former Democratic congressman. Barrow says he believes Georgians have a right to abortion under the state constitution, while Pinson says it’s inappropriate for him to talk about issues and important not to make the race partisan.

Justices Michael Boggs, John Ellington and Nels Peterson are unopposed. Six judges on the Georgia Court of Appeals are also unopposed, while Jeff Davis and Tabitha Ponder are contending for an open seat on that intermediate court of appeal.

OTHER CONGRESSIONAL RACES

Incumbent U.S. Reps. Lucy McBath and David Scott, both Democrats, face challengers from their own party in redrawn districts.

Scott faces six challengers in the 13th District in Atlanta’s southern and eastern suburbs. They include former East Point City Council member Karen René, former South Fulton City Council member Mark Baker and attorney Brian Johnson. On the Republican side, Jonathan Chavez is running against Johsie Fletcher.

U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath has jumped from the 7th District to run in the 6th District, on the western side of metro Atlanta. She’s being challenged by fellow Democrats Mandisha Thomas, a state representative, and Jerica Richardson, a Cobb County commissioner.

LOCAL RACES

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, in the national spotlight for her prosecution of former President Trump and others, faces attorney Christian Wise Smith in the Democratic primary. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding in the same case, is being challenged by lawyer and talk show host Robert Patillo. Lawyer Tiffani Johnson was disqualified from challenging McAfee.

WHAT WILL TURNOUT BE LIKE?

While 5 million or more Georgians could vote in November’s presidential election, history suggests many fewer people will vote in the primary.

In 2016, the last time the state primaries didn’t coincide with the presidential primary, only one-fifth as many people voted in May as in the presidential general election in November. With few hotly contested congressional primaries, races for county offices may be what bring voters to the polls in some parts of Georgia.