The story of Eres

Eres: 'With AI, you can get the most out of the possibilities'

Eres came to Leiden to study for a master's degree in Linguistics. He now lives and works on Bali, where he uses AI to make tourists' stays even more enjoyable.

'I never thought I’d now be working with AI,' says Eres. 'Within the master's programme in Linguistics, I actually wanted to focus on building corpora, large collections of language, but just before I came to Leiden, a new specialisation in computational linguistics started.’

Wordle with AI

One of the courses Eres enrolled in was Advanced Topics in Deep Learning for Natural Language  Processing. ‘Under the guidance of Stephan Raaijmakers, a small group of students and I tried to teach a Large Language Model to play Wordle.’ Large language models consist of large amounts of textual data, which they use to process and produce human language. The question was to what extent they could learn to master the online version of Scrabble.

'It went better and better, partly because these models develop incredibly quickly,’ says Eres. 'There's a new one every three months. I mainly learned to write very good prompts, which means I get the right result in every new version.’ Eres finds AI developments so interesting that he is writing his thesis on the subject and has found a job in this field.

Making the most of the possibilities

To his own surprise, he now works and lives at a luxury resort in Bali. ‘I always thought I would stay in the Netherlands or go back to Jakarta, but then I ended up here,’ he says. ‘The resort has four hotels, fourteen swimming pools and beaches, and 25 restaurants. That can be overwhelming for guests. Our chatbot helps them feel welcome and quickly find what they are looking for. In this way, we support the staff with our technology. It is absolutely not our intention to replace anyone; that would be dystopian.’

Reliable results

To make the best possible use of the AI facilities, Eres writes prompts, but he also analyses the data available to the resort . ‘For example, with Large Language Models, can we analyze what guests talk about with call centre staff? And could the resort perhaps prevent complaints in the future? Previously this would take at least weeks to analyze, but we can get reliable results within a few days with LLMs. It's fantastic to see how these models have developed in recent years. As an AI engineer, I can make the most of the current possibilities to deliver ever higher quality.'

An added bonus is that after a hard day's work he can cool off in the sea. ‘The beaches at the resort are for guests, but there is a public beach nearby where you can enjoy a beautiful sunset while sipping a drink.’