Udacity has launched a new Nanodegree program, Generative AI. For software developers, it is a four-month program at Intermediate level and the prerequisites you'll need are Python at an intermediate level, familiarity with transformer neural networks and other AI topics.
As Udacity already has a over 80 well-established Nanodegree programs it isn't often that we hear of a new one. The choice of subject matter is hardly surprising as the topic of Generative AI is currently inescapable. But as it is often misrepresented in a lot of the coverage, you might be under the impression that it is the direct result of large language models. So it is good to have a learning opportunity that looks at GenAI in its entirety with a practical, hands-on approach.
According to Ed Wiley, who is the lead instructor for the program, Udacity has designed it to meet the demands of an era where GenAI will reshape nearly every industry and functional area and that it will equip professionals with essential skills to branch out into this dynamic and rapidly growing field.
Graduates of the program will be able to:
Situate generative AI within the broader history, context, and applications of artificial intelligence and deep learning,
Adapt generative foundation models to perform tasks in novel contexts,
Use LLMs and prompt engineering to create a customer chatbot,
Use image generation models such as Stable Diffusion to perform image inpainting, and
Build a software program driven by autonomous AI agents.
The are four courses each with a practical project:
GenAI Fundamentals A "crash course" in deep learning and how generative AI compares and contrasts with previous AI techniques. Project: Apply Lightweight Fine-Tuning to a Foundation Model - Load a foundation model and explore advanced techniques in AI model fine-tuning with Hugging Face and PyTorch.
LLMs & Text Generation Dive deeper into how computers understand and create language, and build a custom chatbot using unsupervised machine learning and prompt engineering. Project: Build a Custom Chat Bot - Apply retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to create a custom OpenAI chatbot without fine-tuning.
Computer Vision & Generative AI Learn how computers process and understand image data, then harness the power of the latest Generative AI models to create new images. Project: AI Photo Editing with Inpainting - Use the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and Stable Diffusion to replace parts of images with AI-generated content.
GenAI Solutions Build applications and AI agents using the OpenAI API, vector databases and semantic search, the LangChain framework, and techniques for recommendation, personalization, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Project: Personalized Real Estate Agent - Build a “real estate agent” application that uses LLMs for content generation, vector databases.
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