Making Magic with Generative AI

Generative AI has elevated AI into the mainstream and made it the topic of dinner-table conversations everywhere. Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT enable software to do things that were never before possible, from answering natural-language questions with natural-language responses to generating charts and graphs from verbal descriptions. Image generators such as Stable Diffusion turn text into eye-popping images. Are you curious to know what generative AI is, how it works, and how to use it to infuse AI into your apps and business processes? Bring your laptop and take a deep dive into generative AI in this hands-on workshop. Learn how to put LLMs over documents and databases, build state-of-the-art virtual assistants, implement zero-shot image classifiers, and more.

Preparation:

• Access to Google Colab (https://colab.research.google.com/). Colab is free and it provides access to GPUs for training advanced deep-learning models. There are also paid versions available, but the free version is fine for this workshop. All you have to have to use Colab is a Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, you can create one for free at https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/27441.
• An OpenAI account. If you don’t have one, go to https://openai.com/ and create one using your Google or Microsoft account. All OpenAI accounts are paid accounts, but you should receive $18 worth of free credits when you sign up. We will use less than $1 of those credits in the workshop.
• A laptop with a Python 3.8.5 or higher environment installed. You can install directly from the Python Web site (https://www.python.org/), or you can install a prepackaged environment such as Anaconda (https://www.anaconda.com/download). The latter has most of the packages you need preinstalled. Others, such as OpenAI’s openai package and Hugging Face’s transfomers package, can be installed during the workshop.