I got this booklet for free. Offered through an email list ad. As you can see on the cover, this is a special edition sponsored by Snowflake. The kind of book that every director, manager or project leader reads and lets them declare «he or she is someone who knows about the subject».

Despite its size, it covers several points. The content is not great, nothing technical, but as I say, in just a few pages, it covers many essential topics and provides an introductory overview to LLMs and gen AI applications, techniques for training and tuning, and related to deploying machine learning (ML) models.

The book states in the beginning that «the objective is to provide a technical foundation without ‘getting into the weeds,’ and to help bridge the gap between AI experts and their counterparts in marketing, sales, finance, product, and more.» In short, it is just to let the reader know about the «importance of gen AI applications that are secure, resilient, easy to manage, and that can integrate with your existing technology ecosystem». Just a good wish.

So, generally speaking, the books provide a general idea of the importance of data and how it enables the «gen AI model» to achieve the things you’re reading everywhere, what this can provide you, and also a general overview of what LLMs are. Unfortunately, the descriptions given are too general… as if you were trying to identify a pulsar, magnetar, neutron star, and many other stars by looking through a telescope and hearing a description of each star’s aspects or particularities. Suitable for an elementary school, but not to base an interstellar mission in space.

The rest of the chapters list the main aspects to consider to develop, deploy and use gen AI apps and to compete in a gen AI market, but not precisely how to do it, I mean, to create that «killer application» that everyone is expecting. I will not say it is worthless, nor is it worth reading once. It is convenient to read it once and then keep it in mind for a while, until you gain a much more solid foundation in the field and practical experience.