Practical AI on the Google Cloud Platform

Preface

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 that the mathematics or programming they took in school is not the math they need to use for AI. For those who learn the correct math and programming, they then face the roadblock of building real, working AI—often with limited resources. While many companies see the value in investing in AI, the amount they are currently willing to invest is very small. 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—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. 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 Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Of course, what the next wave of AI/machine learning will look like remains to be seen. Will it be a set of automation tools that make our lives easier, or will it be ...