Practical AI on the Google Cloud Platform

Chapter 2. AI on the Google Cloud Platform

Since the implementation of the first self-driving cars, Google has had a predominant hand in shaping the AI landscape. The company has embraced all aspects of AI development, from text and speech recognition and translation to deep reinforcement learning, and it has acquired or recruited some of the best and brightest minds in the AI space. From this, Google is now providing its expertise in AI as a complete suite of services. While others are competing to do the same, Google is certainly the first place you should look when building any AI application in the future.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the many powerful AI services Google currently provides on its cloud platform. From there we will look at how you can sign up and start working with these services. Then we will dive in and work hands-on with Google Colab and build a couple of deep learning examples with Keras. After that, we will expand on those examples by using the AutoML Tables service to upload and work with our own sample datasets. Finally, we will review the Google Cloud Shell and look at other utilities we will need over the course of the book.

In this chapter, we start coding and working with cloud services. As such, you may find it helpful to have a computing device with a larger screen and keyboard to work with the coding examples.

Here is a brief summary of the main content we will cover in this chapter:

• AI Services on GCP

• Google Colab Notebooks ...