Time to Share

As we built the CodeBoxx Curriculum back in 2018, on the other side of the segment reated to fundamentals where students learned various compiled and interpredted programming languages, it became clear that several weeks would have to be dedicated to the latest cloud capablities already available on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services leveraging Artificial Intelligence as a service. It was amazing to see the creativity and pragmatism of apprentice.

CodeBoxx – AI Introductory Lecture

I was always extremely excited to present the Artificial Intelligence weeks at CodeBoxx, specifically because it is a topic I’m passionate about. I’ve been exposed to artificial intelligence and even went back to school to understand the various forms it takes and keeps taking, as well as to learn how to use the foundational nuts and bolts of the field.

I started doing experiments involving artificial intelligence back in 2013 as the CTO of the startup The RealReal. Even earlier, with vente-privee.com (Now Veepee), we tried to make predictions on customer propensity to buy based on set pricing. In other words, we tried to predict the best price for selling an item. We needed artificial intelligence to come up with reliable answers to very complicated questions. And, as with many driving factors in our world these days, they are most often money-related. So far, what has driven the real interest in artificial intelligence are economic drivers, ways to enhance margins, ways to automate tasks, ways to make up for labor shortages, or ways to correct human flaws or augment these same humans, enabling them to perform beyond biological limitations. This next frontier poses the challenges that accelerate the need to use artificial intelligence as a privileged vehicle.

I’m extremely excited to actually put this perspective in front of you now. And I’m doing this because you guys have what it takes now to experiment or experience how to use Artificial Intelligence in the modern world. How to use AI as a Service is actually what we are going to look into. So that’s why I’m so excited about it because I’ve been close to it, I’ve seen what it can do, and believe me, we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of the way it’s going to change our world. And I invite you to look at the story behind a startup that had a short lifespan but a truly significant one: clearview.ai, which back in 2020, was a breakthrough application of AI that was making the news. Law enforcement institutions in the United States and around the world were starting to acquire licenses of a product called clearview.AI, a real breakthrough in the face recognition field. And the world has been able to reignite investigations on criminal cases that had been stalled for years. And like within thirty seconds, they have been able to solve the case just using face recognition capabilities based on machine learning.

As with all emerging breakthrough technologies that have gone to mainstream adoption, there are also debates around like AI can be use for good and can also be used for bad. So how do we make a difference, how do we prevent AI to be used for the wrong doings ?And how do we even judge what is good and what is bad in the AI world ? So those are all ongoing debates and it’s very exciting to be part of this. You guys, take your first. steps in a larger world, to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi.

And it’s really unprecedented in the realm of technology that a nacent technology penetrates all layers of society so fast, just look at how quickly OpenAI got ChatGPT to 1 Million users… and our society is adapting so fast that we find so may new use cases for it. So this pace in evolution and adoption is truly accelerating and you’re not going to become specialists out of a few weeks experimenting with AI. Just like the rest of the CodeBoxx curriculum, it’s not about mastery, it’s about awareness and getting an understanding of where to start. You’re going to be introduced to it, you’re going to familiarize with it, but if you want to become specialists in Artificial Intelligence, we have obviously a plethora of recommended tracks and programs. But in the meantime, what we are developing is that program, you have those locations where actually you can learn about Artificial Intelligence right away.

Using the best out there in terms of Artificial Intelligence as a Service you can develop your own services through knowledge on Coursera, amazing courses from very well known universities like Berkley, Standford, etc. You can get certifications from Universities; you can get some truly practical at Udemy, Stack Skills, all places where you can actually learn about AI and put it to work. So Artificial Intelligence is a way to, once again, multiply experiences. So Let’s say you wanna implement an interaction with a Home Assistant like Alexa or like Google Home or its latest Gemini, Meta’s Llama 3, Open AI’s GPT. Well, It’s always the same way, right they sell how it works: So you’re gonna open in interaction flow. You’re gonna say :”Hey Alexa” or “Hey Google!”, ” OK Alexa”. This is how you open in reaction flow. Then Alexa or Google will be detecting Key Enunciations, will try to detect what you want from it. And did we say that him or her ? This is the thing: Artificial Intelligence is not a person but we give it a female voice, so we give it a male voice and we do that because it becomes more acceptable to humains to interact with it. So through Large Language Models and the digitizing of speech, we managed to figure out what the intent is. Once we know what the intent is, we can take action.

If for example you inquire about the weather, a Google Home will go to its immense knowledge base about weather and tell you what the weather is gonna be next week or tomorrow. So the LLM will gather information, they will assemble a sentence and they will speak back to you so that you can understand and get an answer to the question you ask. So there are two challenges that involve some form of Artificial Intelligence in that interaction flow that was just described:

1. The first is we need to digitize your speech, we need to understand what you said, we need to detect intent
2. We then we need to get the answer you seek, and more importantly, validate that it is actually the answer you seek and that it has all the informaion you’ve been looking for.
3. And then that answer needs to be spoken out to you in a way that you will accept, understand, and be satisfied with.

So several uses of Artificial Intelligence in that element. So that’s what you’re gonna be doing this week and the next. You’re gonna be choosing the right service to use or as proposed by Google Cloud or by Amazon Web Services or by Microsoft Azure. And you’re going to be implementing a scenario where you’re going to provide information using an agent through Alexa Skills or through Google Home skills, and there is interaction with Slack as well and that is fine.

Those are going to be your first out on the field of Artificial Intelligence. Obviously I can’t get to the foundation of AI where I would make you make predictions out of data which is the underlying way machine learning is working; this is not what I’m gonna do in one week. What I’m gonna show you is that Artificial Intelligence is already a solved problem and many capabilities are exposed. There are already services that you can leverage to deliver experiences. And those experiences, those services rely on Artificial Intelligence already and already been able to make predictions that they are reliable enough for you to provide answers and results based on tese implemenations of various algorithm that we have. So you’re gonna build a custom service through Alexa or going to use Google Dialog flow to process your tasks. So pick the one you want. You can actually do both if you want. Those are really challenging scenarios and we’ve seen amazing video because at the end, you want to solve your problem the way we’ve actually seen them work in many scenarios widely adopted by businesses and consumers.

You are going to showcase and demo to us by doing a video. So Artificial Intelligence is an assembly of trending technologies including one that is called machine learning. So get through this week with the two exercises and next week, I will explain you the nuts and bolts of how all this is made possible. So first of all, take your first steps into Artificial Intelligence by leveraging services that exists that we are actually going to subscribe to, to deliver experiences just the way you did it to web services. And once you get familiar with what you can actually achieve with Artificial Intelligence, I will explain to you what is the detail ant what is the underlined technology and we will discuss about.

For now, just have fun with this, acquire this new skills. One of the effects this week will have over your profile is that you will make teammates and colleagues jealous in the companies you will land in because you will have built an Alexa skill, you will have built a Google skill and in a large case, developers with an ongoing task and job didn’t even get to making Alexa skills or trying these new skills yet. They have not gotten to it yet. So you’re gonna land in a meeting and say “Oh we can do an Alexa skill for that and I know how we can do or provide a template for it”, people will target you and say ” Oh he knows the latest stuff”. This is about create an edge for yourself. At Codeboxx, we tend to teach ahead of the curve and try things on the verge of being adopted, and this is one of those situations where you get to deal with technology that are a little ahead of the curve so that you can actually know it and propose it when time is right.

You cannot propose it to anyone at anytime or for any use case or need though. You need to find the appropriate time to bring it up. But Artificial Intelligence has now reached such a level of maturity that you can actually think of concrete applications that can add value to a business.

So let’s try it together this week, let’s build teams, and let’s explore what Alexa can do, let’s explore what Google Dialog flow can do. Good luck! Enjoy this week and build your edge as a developer during this very important week.