A Generative AI course for beginners

Microsoft Cloud Advocates have created a new set of training materials to enable the learning of the fundamentals of building Generative AI applications with a 12-lesson comprehensive course. Each lesson covers a key aspect of Generative AI principles and application development. Throughout this course, you will be building your own Generative AI start up so you can get an understanding of what it takes to launch your ideas. The agenda is below.

	Lesson Link Course Introduction - How to Take This Course	Concepts Taught Tech setup and course structure	Learning Goal Setting you up for success while learning in this course
	Introduction to Generative AI and LLMs	Concept: Generative AI and the current technology landscape	Understanding what Generative AI is and how Large Language Models (LLMs) work.
	Exploring and comparing different LLMs	Concept: Testing, iterating, and comparing different Large Language Models	Select the right model for your use case
	Using Generative AI Responsibly	Concept: Understanding the limitations of foundation models and the risks behind AI	Learn how to build Generative AI Applications responsibly
	Understanding Prompt Engineering Fundamentals	Code/Concept: Hands-on application of Prompt Engineering Best Practices	Understand prompt structure & usage
	Creating Advanced Prompts	Code/Concept: Extend your knowledge of prompt engineering by applying different techniques to your prompts	Apply prompt engineering techniques that improve the outcome of your prompts.
	Building Text Generation Applications	Code: Build a text generation app using Azure OpenAI	Understand how to efficiently use tokens and temperature to vary the model's output
	Building Chat Applications	Code: Techniques for efficiently building and integrating chat applications.	Identify key metrics and considerations to effectively monitor and maintain the quality of AI-powered chat applications
	Building Search Apps Vector Databases	Code: Semantic vs Keyword search. Learn about text embeddings and how they apply to search	Create an application that uses Embeddings to search for data.
	Building Image Generation Applications	Code: Image generation and why it's useful in building applications	Build an image generation application
	Building Low Code AI Applications	Low Code: Introduction to Generative AI in Power Platform	Build a Student Assignment Tracker App for our education startup with Low Code
	Integrating External Applications with Function Calling	Code: What is function calling and its use cases for applications	Setup a function call to retrieve data from an external API
	Designing UX for AI Applications	Concept: Designing AI Applications for Trust and Transparency	Apply UX design principles when developing Generative AI Applications
	Continue Your Learning	Links to continue your learning from each lesson!	Mastering your Generative AI skills

Microsoft Fabric is Generally Available

I watched the session 

Make your data AI ready with Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks

Jessica Hawk, Amir Netz, Arun Ulagaratchagan, Patrick Baumgartner, Profile picture of Kristen Christensen, Justyna Lucznik

'Bring your data into the era of AI with Microsoft Fabric, a powerful all in one AI powered analytics solution for enterprises that covers everything from data movement to data science, real time analytics and business intelligence. Learn how Azure Databricks and Microsoft Fabric seamlessly work together to offer customers a modern, price performant analytics solution that helps teams turn data into a competitive advantage.'

The discussion centred around the general availability of Microsoft Fabric. Below are are few slide images from the presentation.

Here is some more information about the changes.

Prepare your data for AI innovation with Microsoft Fabric—now generally available

Microsoft Fabric, explained for existing Synapse users

The new Microsoft Purview portal (preview)

The new Microsoft Purview portal helps you discover and access data security, data governance, and risk and compliance solutions for all your data in your data estate. This unified experience streamlines navigation for all Purview solutions and provides a single-entry point for settings, search, and roles and permissions management.  The risk and compliance solutions in the portal currently opens these solutions in the classic Microsoft Purview compliance portal . The portal inclusions:

New Microsoft Purview portal (preview) can be found at: https://purview.microsoft.com

The solution cards on the portal home page provide quick access to open the Microsoft Purview solutions where access has been granted. It is great to see the Purview portals coming together under one roof as this will make navigation easier. 

Microsoft Ignite 2023

An exciting introduction to Microsoft Ignite November 15 - 17, 2023. Two themes that I am excited about are the AI and Microsoft Fabric capability. 

Microsoft Ignite 2023: AI transformation and the technology driving change

The full list of changes at Microsoft Ignite are listed in the Microsoft Ignite Book of News.

In the main keynote Satya announced over 100 changes. A few of the announcements discussed in the keynote are mentioned here:

Azure Maia - The Microsoft Cloud accelerator optimized for LLM training and inference

Azure Open AI Service  updates

• GPT-4 Turbo - Preview
• GPT-4 Turbo with Vision - Preview
• DALL-E 3 - Preview
• Fine Tuning - Preview

Model catalog - New

• Stable Diffusion
• Code Llama
• Mistral 7B
• NVIDA Nemotron-3 8B

Models as a Service - announcing

• Ready to use APIs
• Hosted finetuning
• Integrated with leading LLM tools

Phi-2 - Announcing

• Built by Microsoft Research
• 2.7 billion parameters
• Common sense, language understanding, and logical reasoning

The Phi-2 model is changing the game in artificial intelligence (AI) and it is designed to make machines think more like humans and do it safely.

Azure AI Studio - Preview

• Unified platform
• Hybrid and sematic search
• Full development lifecycle
• Extends to Windows
• Safe and Responsible AI

The Copilot stack is evolving with greater functionality.

Microsoft Fabric is now generally available, a data platform for the era of AI.

Azure AI Search - Deliver accurate, hyper-personalized responses in your Gen AI applications

There was also announcement of Mesh on Microsoft Teams being generally available. 

• Copilot and avatar
• Immersive spaces
• No-code editor
• Copilot and 3D space

Then finally something different Azure Quantum Elements - purpose built to accelerate scientific discovery.

PASS Community Summit 2023 Keynote 1

The PASS Data Community Summit 2023 global data conference is happening in Seattle between 14-17 November 14-17 2023.  

The first keynote 'Limitless growth, limitless opportunities: Data and innovation in an AI world' was given by  Shireesh Thota. He started talking about new technologies and how they offer limitless potential with AI, Generative AI and Real-time capabilities.  The limitiless growth with Azure and those SQL databases: SQL Server, Azure SQL, Postgres, CosmosDB and MySQL. These offer limitless scale, flexible tools, Built-in AI, Performance and Guaranteed availability. 

There are celebrations a foot due to SQL Server on Windows reaching 30 years old this year. SQL Server 2022 is the fastest adopted version of SQL Server with growth on both Windows and Linux. He also mentioned SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc with that cloud manageability for managing your entire SQL Server estate. Announcements were made

Discussions moved to Azure SQL and the family of SQL cloud in edge databases. A further announcement was made about the Azure SQL Managed Instance feature wave , that is now generally available. Azure SQL Managed instance has a free offer in preview for 12 months of free managed instance, available soon.

 What's new in Azure SQL Managed Instance?

They talked about that Cloud Modernization Journey: Evaluate, Optimize, Migrate and Modernize with ease. 

Another announcement Azure SQL Database Hyperscale will be same price as commercial OSS databases – General Available mid December.

Some further to announcements were shared

• Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore – Generally Available
• Vector Search in Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore – Generally Available 
• Natural language queries for Azure Cosmos DB – Public Preview
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL Extension for Azure AI – Preview

Then concluding with the database of the future will be autonomous and intelligent, developer friendly, cost efficient, and mission critical by default.

Microsoft Cloud Innovation and Security Summit

I had the privilege to present at the The Form Rooms on Tuesday 14 November 2023 at the Microsoft Cloud Innovation and Security Summit run by Cloud Direct.  

The Forms Rooms is on a quiet street in London’s chic Covent Garden that was once a historic Victorian school that has been lovingly restored. 

My session was on 'The disruptive power of data and AI'.  About how Generative AI, Microsoft Fabric and Data Governance are the talk of the town, but without the building blocks of good quality, secure, accessible data, innovation in business is stunted. 

The talk covered how Data & AI are providing a catalyst for innovation addressing  

• Where is Data & AI tech going
• Why having an agile data strategy and data governance adoption path is important. 
• How data can be a catalyst for innovation 

In today’s world technology changes and enhancements are accelerating at speed. Developments from the 1960’s took decades to move into the modern workplace. But now we see these coming to the fore with the democratisation of technology.  We moved from the 

1970s where Codd invented the relational database

To the 1990s when ‘Big Data’ became a term to address the ever-increasing large volume of data, with discussions of volume, velocity , variety and veracity. Here we saw the mention of that ever-important reference to the quality of data. 

With that grew the ‘Internet of Things’ processing more data from sensors, devices and communication networks. 

Behind the scenes world leading database researchers meet every few years to discuss the impact on practice, challenges and emerging applications. The latest output was documented in the Seattle report in 2019. One of the areas discussed was the fact that it was impractical to continue to move volumes of data between systems. We see this fundamental change in Microsoft Fabric.

And today, it is all about ‘Generative AI’ and what it can create...

There were many really interesting sessions during the conference with Innovation, AI and Security intertwined. 

Data Toboggan Alpine Coaster 2023 Agenda

Announcing the Data Toboggan - Alpine Coaster Agenda for APAC, EMEA and AMER

Sign up for Data Toboggan Alpine Coaster

Event: Friday 24th November

Register: https://bit.ly/DTAC23-Register

Agenda: https://www.datatoboggan.co.uk/alpine-coaster-2023-agenda/