Getting Started with Generative AI
There are a plethora of options for building generative AI (GenAI) applications. The landscape is, quite frankly, overwhelming to navigate, and many of the tools that satisfy one criterion may fall short in another. GenAI applications evolve so quickly that within weeks of this book being published, some of the new AI companies might no longer exist. Therefore, this chapter focuses on long-lived, high-level concepts related to technologies that are used to create GenAI applications.
You will learn ways from which your next web development project might benefit. This chapter will examine not just what these ways are but how they work, which will give you a broader understanding and perspective of GenAI. This should help you decide when to use GenAI and how, as well as make the applications you create generally more accurate.
By the end of this chapter, you will have a good understanding of the benefits that individual AI/ML stack components bring to a development project, how they relate to each other, and why GenAI technologies are a revolution in software—both in terms of the data handled and desired functionalities.
This chapter gives an introduction to GenAI and provides a quick overview of the following topics:
- Definitions for common terminology
- A GenAI stack of choice
- Python and GenAI
- The OpenAI API
- An introduction to MongoDB Vector Search
- Important features of GenAI
- Why use GenAI?
- The ethics and risks of GenAI
