Micheal Lanham - Practical AI on the Google Cloud Platform: Learn How to Use the Latest AI Cloud Services on the Google Cloud Platform

by Micheal Lanham

Copyright 2020 Micheal Lanham. All rights reserved.

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This book was developed for an audience that I regularly see at my local Deep Learning Meetup group. A group of young, very eager and very intelligent people wanting to understand and use the latest AI. Except, their dreams are often crushed or soured when they realize the mathematics or programming they took in school is not that math they need to use for AI. For those that learn the math and programming they then face the roadblock of building real working AI with often limited resources. While many companies see the value in investing in AI the amount they are currently willing to invest is very little. In fact, developing cutting edge AI can be quite expensive computationally and that equals money.

Google likely encountered the same audience I had seen at my Meetup groups. A group of very young and keen newbies eager to learn but missing certain resources when it decided to build its first AI cloud platform. However, what likely solidified that decision was seeing the same mentality expressed in corporations and businesses worldwide. Companies were essentially in the same boat as those trying to learn this new AI tech. By providing an entire AI platform with state of the art models and other training tools in the cloud was a no brainer. And so it was born, Google AI on the GCP.

It of course remains to be seen what the next wave of AI/machine learning will look like. Will it be a set of automation tools that make our life easier or will it be something else? While I agree automation tools like robot cleaners, self-driving cars and so on will be a part of it, it wont be the only part. What I see is the potential for a whole new wave of AI assistant or AI automation assistant apps. These could be smart assistants that do everything from the following:

• Self Help: everything from assistant to maintain physical training to just mangaging your weight, this will likely be a major part of what we use AI for in the future.
• Personal Automation: Google has already shown how personal assistants will be able to book your next hair appointment but this could be taken a step further. Perhaps automating a series of tasks to create a vacation or perhaps an adventure vacation.
• Financial Management: imagine being able to have Warren Buffet as your personal financial advisor, except instead of him you get an AI assistant that can and will manage all your money for you. That includes setting up and making investments and so on. An AI that would work 24/7 managing your money and making extra money for you wont be a hard app to sell.
• Care Assistants: as the world ages the number of physical care assistants to help aging needs to also increase. For the most part this will be physical care but this likely will include more mudane tasks like remembering medication or making appointments. Although, this could progress to real medical diagnosticians that are better able to track your whole medical history through life.
• Teachers: perhaps an AI teacher that allowed you to better manage and track your learning goals. This AI agent could progress with you in life and manage your lifetimes education and even accreditations. Image hiring an AI bot that trained you but then also accredited your training to others?
• Entertainment: people in the AI community have been writing or trying to write self-aware chat bots for decades. Examples of this have been the focus of several movies including the Oscar winner Her. Her, features a Siri like AI that becomes or is self-aware and falls in love with a human. The AI in Her was developed more as a general Siri like assistant and was not intended as a love bot, at least not portrayed that way in the movie. Except, perhaps the intentention should be to build love or companion AI in a variety of forms. You could have imaginary AI friends for the lonely child or perhaps replicas of old celebrities for those aging and so on. The possibilites are endless in this area.
• Protection: imagine if you had an AI that could protect you in multiple ways from guarding your financies to just looking behind your back when you walk home late at night. These could be separate AI or perhaps combined.
• Everything else: the list of these types of AI agents could go on and on and it remains to be seen as to what becomes practical in this brand new space.

While the goal of this book will be to teach you how to use the Google AI platform for a variety of reasons it is my hope that you think about how these services could be used to power the above type of AI assistants.

Of course, you may not be ready to pull all the resources together to build an AI assitant. Therefore, I have also made this book accessible for you by showing the base case for using the service or system and how best to use it. That way you will be able to use the system for your immediate use and then perhaps later move on to building a full working AI assistant. For those of you looking to just build business AI then I have also shown plenty of examples with that in mind.

If you have any comments or suggestions on the content in this book, please email me at .