foreword
I am genuinely excited to write the foreword for Chrissy LeMaire’s and Brandon Abshire’s new book on generative AI for the IT professional! Chrissy is that quintessential Microsoft MVP who balances real-world technology expertise in IT with a deep understanding of how to engage with different communities to communicate new concepts in relatable ways. Brandon contributes solid professional IT experience, including over a decade and a half as a database administrator and technical manager for top-rated US healthcare systems. Together, they form a powerful combination of expertise spanning enterprise IT, database management, infrastructure, and programming, from web development to PowerShell scripting. With this book, Chrissy and Brandon are filling a critical gap in our AI engineering bookshelf by providing both IT professionals and aspiring AI engineers with a roadmap to understand generative AI operations (GenAIOps) so they can streamline the development workflow from prompt to production.
After OpenAI debuted its GPT-3 models powering a new class of generative AI applications, ChatGPT became a household word. The industry took note, recognizing that the power of natural language processing with pretrained models effectively made everyone a programmer with the power of their words. At the time, we had a handful of model providers, and developers could afford to experiment with each new model to unlock its capabilities and harness it to their application scenarios.