Hands-On Generative AI with Transformers and Diffusion Models

Preface

Generative AI is a revolutionary technology that has rapidly transitioned from lab demos to real-world applications, impacting billions. It can create new content—images, text, audio, videos, and more—by learning patterns from existing data, thereby enhancing creativity, augmenting data, or assisting in many tasks. For instance, a generative AI model trained on music can compose new melodies, while one trained on text can generate stories or even programming code.

This book isn’t just for experts—it’s for anyone who wants to learn about this fascinating new field. We won’t focus on building models from scratch or diving straight into complicated mathematics. Instead, we’ll leverage existing models to solve real-world problems, helping you to build a solid intuition around how these techniques work and providing the foundation for you to keep exploring.

This hands-on approach, we hope, will help you get up and running quickly and efficiently with generative AI. You’ll learn how to use pretrained models, adapt them for your needs, and generate new data with them. You’ll also learn how to evaluate the quality of generated data and explore ethical and social issues that may arise from using generative AI. This exposure will allow you to stay up-to-date with new models and help you identify areas that you may want to explore more deeply.

Who Should Read This Book

Given the impressive products and news you might have seen about generative AI, it’s normal to be excited, or worried, ...