DeepSeek and other neural networks: a guide to using AI for beginners

Neural networks write marketing and even artistic texts, analyze Big Data, help to pump new skills, paint amazing paintings and compose music. By the way, the latter two directions (i.e. creative neural networks) are somewhat easier than with text and research ones, since their functionality is still limited and relies on visual or audio descriptions. Also, text neural networks, for example, DeepSeek, ChatGPT or Gemini are used more often because they have a wider range of applications. That is why we will discuss them in this article, namely how to turn an outlandish smart technology into your personal assistant for any needs from business to personal experiences in the spirit of "supporting me mentally, friend" (yes, modern AI can do that).

How neural networks have entered our lives

Back in the middle of the 20th century, the idea of artificial intelligence seemed like a utopia worthy of Isaac Asimov's novels or films in the spirit of the 2001 Space Odyssey. Scientists were just beginning to think about machines that could mimic human thinking. The first algorithms created in the 1950s were primitive: they could solve logical problems, but they were still far from the real "mind".

There were no major breakthroughs in the 1970s and 1980s either. Moreover, this period can be called the "period of disappointment", because it was then, despite all their attempts, scientists ran into technical limitations imposed by the underdevelopment of the entire industry, and realized that in the near future they would not be able to get around them. Many projects were postponed or closed, funding was cut, and it was only in the early 90s, when the power of computing algorithms finally increased and new approaches to programming appeared, that scientists regained hope and interest in AI.

The real revolution took place only in the 2010s, when it was possible to teach neural networks to recognize images and human speech, which became the starting point for them to acquire analytical and thinking abilities. So, Google Photos (automatic image sorting) and Siri (the first mass voice assistant built into Apple devices) became the first of their kind. They not only opened the "software curtain" on how to make sure that any user could communicate with AI, but also showed exactly this "anyone" in practice, demonstrated the possibilities and benefits of widespread use of the neural network.

More advanced models, which we have the good fortune to use so far, appeared already in the 2020s. Their models are called generative, because they are designed to generate texts or any other materials from scratch (based on other people's texts and materials that were previously automatically trained, of course). That's how the era of ChatGPT and DeepSeek began - when AI really spoke.

Now the neural network can not only answer questions, but also conduct meaningful dialogue, write articles, and even joke or try on the role of a specific professional, a famous personality like Albert Einstein or a fictional character. Following OpenAI, Google (Gemini), Anthropic (Claude) and Chinese developers presented their models (the same DeepSeek we mentioned in the title simply because it is completely free, and therefore it is easiest for you to start with it).

What are neural networks capable of and where can you use them?

In fact, there are a lot of applications for generative AI, not even one or two articles will be enough to list everything. But we invite you to get acquainted with the most popular areas of it and examples of how other people and even large companies use AI! Various interesting neural networks that you should also pay attention to are attached.

1. Education: from virtual tutors to personal study plans

As already mentioned, AI is able to try on absolutely any role - just write to him like that "Now you are my teacher / mentor." So, with his help, you can collect information for a report on economics, check the correctness of calculations, but also ask him to explain something to you in simple language. In fact, AI easily turns into an online tutor, for this purpose there are even special services based on neural networks, for example, Khanmigo from Khan Academy. On Khanmigo, you literally have a dialogue with the chatbot, as with your teacher: it also asks you leading questions, answers those that arise from you, and adapts explanations to your level of knowledge or needs. He can even ask you for homework if you ask! Thus, AI is becoming indispensable in technical sciences, for example, in mathematics, where simplification of information and accuracy of calculations are often required.

Standard DeepSeek is able to check your work for you or conduct super-fast research in the spirit of "one hundred articles in two minutes". To do this, you upload PDF or DOC files to the correspondence and set the AI a goal, for example, to find commonalities between all these works or, conversely, to find interesting differences, contradictions, etc. This simplifies analytical work and classification.

2. Marketing: from creating Instagram posts to serving as a creative director

Since generative AI is called generative because it can create anything, it's a sin not to use it to create content for your brand! So, you can turn a neural network into your personal SMM manager and use it to write any number of posts for any of your social networks - it will even take into account the difference between these social networks and the characteristics of your audience (if you specify them). You can also generate descriptions for products in online catalogs, as does, for example (according to some sources), the clothing company H&M and marketplaces. It also simplifies the launch of email newsletters, namely, it reduces the time for preparing emails by 2-3 times.

However, neural networks in marketing are not limited to content alone - did we mention the creative director for a reason? So, AI can predict trends for you and detect patterns in advertising strategies, both yours and competitors (if you are looking for the secret of their success, for example). Google Trends AI, for example, always predicts an increase in demand for certain product groups due to recent social and even geopolitical events - it even managed to predict a "boom" in household goods two months before the start of quarantine in 2020. The Persado neural network also analyzes the emotional response of your audience to ads and helps you customize content to meet their triggers and emotional needs, pre-collecting and analyzing them.

3. Programming: from fixing code to writing code for games

Even DeepSeek, which we call "standard" in the article because of its universal text format, is capable of writing full-fledged applications and even mobile games, albeit not complex ones (about the level of a "snake"). According to GitHub, the web hosting service for IT projects, 46% of new code is now written using AI. Even the Tesla developers at one of their conferences admitted that AI helps them write from 25% to 40% of the code, which reduces the time and resources for the development and production of cars by about 30%.

AI can also be used to identify errors in existing and written code to reduce the time needed for self-verification. The platform Cursor.sh creates a special virtual environment for this purpose with an integrated pair programming function and even a chat. The AI tests the proposed code, and then explains exactly what is broken in it and how it can be fixed.

4. Medicine: from collecting medical history to making a preliminary diagnosis

In this area, the use of AI is still being treated with caution, but in 2023, the FDA approved more than 200 medical devices powered by artificial intelligence, and Google's DeepMind Health system detects signs of breast cancer on mammograms with an accuracy of 94.5% (compared to 88% for radiologists). In some clinics, AI also analyzes CT scans, identifying suspicious areas in 10-12 seconds. Thus, AI becomes a powerful tool for doctors (especially considering the busy schedule of most) and an additional stage of checking each patient, which allows to increase the timeliness and accuracy of diagnosis.

In 2023, The Daily Mail also published the story of a seven-year-old boy from the United States who had been suffering from chronic pain, difficulty moving, and mood swings since the age of four. Seventeen doctors could not diagnose him in any way, until the boy's mother, in desperation, turned to ChatGPT and described all the symptoms to him, attaching the data from the tests. As a result, ChatGPT diagnosed the boy with a rare disease with spina bifida, and the diagnosis turned out to be correct, thanks to which the boy was finally able to start treatment. Of course, we can't recommend doing this either if you have strange symptoms, because we can't guarantee the accuracy of the diagnosis, but it's still useful to have such an AI ability in mind and monitor its developments in the field of healthcare.

More interesting or non-obvious things and tasks that you can assign to AI instead of doing them yourself or looking for a live specialist for this:

• The Harvey AI neural network is designed specifically for lawyers to analyze legislative acts and documents (about 10,000 pages of documents per hour!)

• The Loudly service generates soundtracks based on the description of your mood or the desired melody.;

• With the same DeepSeek or with any bot from Character AI (a service specializing in creating character bots), you can train any foreign language.

• You can contact ChatGPT or Character AI with psychological problems and ask them to try on the role of a personal psychoanalyst.

• Preparing presentations (for example, using SlidesGo or Pitch, which is enough to upload text and a description of what you want to see.

• Creating annotations and synopses for creative projects, generating ideas, etc.

How to write working and high-quality promos for DeepSeek and other AI

As you may have noticed, there are many different AIS for different requests and purposes, but there are also universal ones that fulfill any request, which can also be answered in text. That's why our advice is the following: start with DeepSeek. It is completely free and multifunctional, allows you to work with files and has a large memory (that is, it allows you to work with a large number and volume of texts), while the free ChatGPT functionality is limited. Gemini is also completely free, and it's integrated into Google, which is another good option. You will have to work with all of them in the same way through promts, that is, text queries. How do you make them up correctly to get exactly the result you need?

Remember, artificial intelligence is not a search engine, but a virtual interlocutor that generates answers based on your questions. The difference is fundamental: Google searches for ready-made information, and neural networks create it. Therefore, the quality of the response is 90% and depends on how you formulate the request. Imagine that it is alive: what happens if you tell your personal assistant to "Prepare the documents for the meeting"? Probably nothing, because even a live assistant won't understand what kind of meeting, what kind of documents, what for, etc. That's why there are certain rules for drafting promts. Make sure that you specify:

• Concreteness and sequence of actions. Instead of "Prepare something for the meeting," it would be correct to say: "Write a presentation plan on new features of the app for investors in 5 slides."

• Style requirements and audience characteristics. For example, "Make a commercial offer for a coffee shop: we supply eco-grain from Colombia. The target audience is premium cafes in New York" or "Explain quantum physics using football as an example: for 8th grade students, without formulas."

• The format (bulletins, guide, checklist, journalistic article, essay, etc.) and the amount of required material. For example, "Make a list of 10 business books for beginners with a brief description of each in 3-5 lines" or "Compare the iPhone 15 and Samsung S24 in the table by 5 parameters."

• Prohibitions and restrictions, if any (they are important because they allow you to achieve a more accurate result). For example, "No complicated terms" or "Just facts, no speculation."

So, a bad prom will sound like: "Write a text about travel." A good similar promotion would be "Write an 800-character Instagram post about a trip to Georgia: the audience is women aged 25-35 who love gastronomy. The emphasis is on local cuisine and non-obvious places. Tone: friendly, humorous."

Important! You can continue to refine the result given by the AI, taking into account new or more specific wishes. For example, "Everything is fine, but add even more humor and remove the repetitions of the word "vegetable garden"" or "Write in more detail about this moment, expand the answer to three more additional paragraphs." Since interaction with the AI is built through dialogue, you can even express your assessment and opinion about the result, and the AI will adjust like a living specialist to please you (if you point out a mistake to it, it will even apologize, try it, it's funny!).

In addition to the lack of specifics in the recipes, beginners may also encounter the problem of "hallucinations." This is how AI's logical and factual errors are called, that is, when it invents things that are not really there, and admits to it only when you catch it red-handed or ask it to verify the accuracy of the information. You can solve this problem as follows:

Double-check the information for the AI manually. Yes, it will take time, but this way you will be sure that the facts are not imaginary, and they can be operated on. To do this, type the statement into any search engine and view the output.

Use the "Do a fact check right away and verify the accuracy of the data" arm. It can be included immediately in your initial promt so that the AI does it at the first task. It's best to get the AI to do such a fact check several times, because it can continue to convince you and itself that the information is true, or give out several hallucinations in a row, even under the guise of "Oh, right, actually...".

Use multiple neural networks. It's hard to say who exactly you'll be able to negotiate with best, since different ais have different features and strengths. You can ask them to check one after the other, or set the same promt for both Gemini and DeepSeek at the same time, and then compare them.

Although there have been increasing claims lately that neural networks will completely replace human specialists very soon, this is unlikely to happen in full. Probably, specialists will simply start using neural networks themselves on a widespread basis (there is already such a profession as an industrial engineer). This is a separate skill that also requires development and practice, and given the pace of development of neural networks, the sooner you master it, the better! So start practicing now. And try to guess: was this article also written by AI or not? :)