welcome
I wanted to start by saying a massive thank you for purchasing the MEAP edition of Generative AI in Action and, in some ways, a leap of faith in me. Generative AI is an extremely popular topic, with the hype and the fear of missing out (FOMO) reaching stratospheric levels! Organizations are trying to understand this new technology and how to implement it. Some of this is to get first-mover advantages; in other cases, it is responding to the competition and the push from the board and CEOs to get in on the action.
This book has been written with a practical and hands-on approach to helping one understand this technology and how it works. It does not get deep into the science but does refer to the papers and scientific breakthroughs that help make some of the technology work.
The book primarily targets an enterprise's developers, data scientists, and technology decision-makers. Still, nothing is exclusive for the most that someone in a smaller organization or a startup won’t benefit or find useful.
The book is in two parts; the first builds out the foundations of Generative AI from the new use cases possible to understanding the basics of Generative AI and Foundational models. We build on those and understand the architecture of Large language models and how one uses them in different modalities of text, images, code, chat, etc. In this first part, we also use simple examples to build with and get our understanding of these new AI technologies.