Fundamentals of Generative AI
Core AI/ML/DL hierarchy, foundation model mechanics, C-S-D-A business value archetypes, learning paradigms, data readiness, and the 4-stage ML lifecycle.
Study pillars
AI (broadest human-like machine intelligence) → ML (learning patterns from data without explicit rules) → Deep Learning (multi-layer neural networks) → Foundation Models (pre-trained on massive unlabeled data, adaptable to many tasks) → Generative AI (creates new text, code, images, audio, video).
Create (draft emails in Gmail, visuals in Slides/Nano Banana, videos in Google Vids, code in Code Assist) • Summarize (reports in Gemini Notebook, meetings in Meet, reviews in Looker) • Discover (demand forecasting on Agent Platform, recommendations in Agent Search, cross-silo search in Gemini Enterprise) • Automate (Document AI extraction, Speech/Translation APIs).
Supervised Learning = labeled data (tags/targets known, e.g., spam detection, price prediction). Unsupervised Learning = unlabeled data (finds natural clusters, segments, or anomalies). Reinforcement Learning = learns via rewards & penalties through interaction (includes RLHF used to align LLMs).
Structured data (SQL/tabular rows) vs. Unstructured data (PDFs, audio, video, emails — ~80%+ of org data). Requires Quality Data (accurate, complete, consistent, relevant) + Accessible Data. Lifecycle: 1. Data Ingestion & Prep → 2. Model Training → 3. Model Deployment → 4. Model Management (Registry versioning + Drift Monitoring).
Gemini (Pro / Frontier = deep multi-step reasoning, autonomous agents, up to 1M tokens; Flash = fast multimodal workhorse & Live streaming; Flash-Lite = ultra-low-cost high-volume routing/extraction; Nano = offline on-device edge via LiteRT) • Specialized Google Models (Nano Banana 2.1 / Imagen = conversational image gen & multi-image fusion; Veo 3.1 = video; Lyria = music/audio; Chirp = 100+ lang speech; Text & Multimodal Embeddings = RAG vectors) • Gemma Open-Weights (Gemma 1/2 = English-only; Gemma 3/3n/4 = 140+ languages; ShieldGemma 2 = safety moderation; CodeGemma, PaliGemma, MedGemma) • Partner/OSS in Model Garden.
Do not confuse Predictive/Discriminative ML (forecasting numbers, counting visitors, classifying spam) with Generative AI (creating novel text, code, images, audio, or synthetic summaries).