Preface
Generative AI – the world has been buzzing about this profound concept recently. Everywhere you turn, whether you are watching the nightly news, listening to some of the brightest business leaders adopting technology, or following the global markets, generative AI is at the forefront of these conversations. This revolutionary technology is being interwoven with all industries, economies, businesses, and organizations at an unprecedented rate.
While the concepts of both artificial intelligence and, more recently, generative AI have been around for quite some time, both entered mainstream knowledge with the introduction of an extremely powerful conversational chatbot, known as ChatGPT.
ChatGPT, introduced in late 2022, interacts with a user or application in a conversational way at a level and precision society has not seen before. We have had chatbots for a very long time, however, ChatGPT broke the mold and essentially catapulted humanity into the “age of AI.”
The technology behind ChatGPT, and thus generative AI, which we will cover in this book, makes it possible to accomplish profound things never seen before – such as answering follow-up questions, admitting its mistakes, challenging incorrect thoughts and suggestions, and even rejecting inappropriate requests, to help protect us. ChatGPT has grabbed the attention of everyone – even those not in the technology industry – due to its powerful knowledge capabilities and speed and precision in responses.
Generative AI is already touching the lives of many of us, with many not even knowing it. And this growth trend will not slow down any time soon. In fact, we expect almost all future careers and jobs to have a basic requirement of core experience/expertise with, plus working knowledge of, some AI, and with a bonus skill of AI/GenAI implementation. This book will serve as your fundamental guide to prepare you for today and for tomorrow.
In this book, we begin in areas where you’ll gain basic knowledge of generative AI and subsequently what it takes to build a successful cloud solution around this AI technology. We’ll use the Microsoft Azure AI Cloud and OpenAI lens for our examples, due to both market leadership and also because we are both currently employed at Microsoft. We do take a holistic, industry-wide approach where the knowledge and concepts can be applied across any cloud solution provider/vendor.
We hope you enjoy reading this book as much as we have had the pleasure of writing it! And please note, although generative AI can create content such as books, this book was created and written by us, the authors, not by the very technology we cover, generative AI (with the exception of the fun, generated comic strips in each chapter!).
