last week I spent 5 hours and $49 to complete Google's latest AI Essentials course for beginners and since I need to recoup that money to fund my addiction to parasocial relationships with AI I made this video to share five key takeaways from the course the pros and cons and to give you a definitive answer as to whether this certificate you receive at the end will indeed get you laid I mean paid paid more because you now have a new skill that was a weird slip of tongue there takeaway number one broadly speaking there are three
types of AI tools out there first Standalone tools are AI powered software designed to work independently with minimal setup this category includes general purpose chat Bots like chache BT Gemini Claude and perplexity as well as specialized apps like spico otter AI mid journey and Gamma although they serve completely different needs all these tools are classified as Standalone because they can be accessed directly through their websites or apps and can be used without integration with other software this is in contrast to the second category tools with integrated AI features which refers to built-in enhancements within a
particular piece of software for example after drafting a post in Google Docs I can either copy and paste this text over to a standalone app like chbt to improve my writing or I can use the built-in or integrated Gemini for workspace AI feature to make adjustments another example would be I can either use mid Journey as a standalone tool to generate images for a presentation or I can create an image directly within Google Slides by using again gemni for workspace in these instances chbt and M Journey are Standalone AI tools and Google Docs and Google
slides are tools with integrated AI features third a custom AI solution is an application that's tailor made to solve a specific problem for instance John Hopkins University developed an AI system with the sole objective of detecting sepsis this custom AI solution improved diagnostic accuracy from 2 to 5% to an average of 40% and if you're like me and have no technical background you might think oh custom AI Solutions are extremely Technical and I'll probably never have to use them in the workplace in reality the opposite is true because well-designed custom AI Solutions should require little
to no technical knoow for example when I was in the sales team I managed over 200 clients every quarter and Performing research on every single one was obviously timec consuming nowadays there are custom AI solutions that can ingest all the information about those 200 clients taking into account factors like seasonality historical data and Industry Trends and rank those clients by How likely they are to need assistance helping the salesperson prioritize their time by the way if you're thinking of buying Google's AI Essentials course don't because I only found out after I paid for it you
get the AI Essentials course for free if you enroll in the Google project management certification on corsera who is kindly sponsoring this portion of the video regular viewers know that I have a full-time job and project management obviously plays a large part in my day-to-day to be transparent though I'm mainly self-taught since there wasn't a go-to course back in the day but I recently started the project management certification on corsera since it's now like the golden standard for project management project management is literally applicable to all Industries and roles so if you want to be
more organized in the workplace click the link below to enroll in the Google project management certification and unlock the AI Essentials course for free thank you corsera for sponsoring this part of the video back to my takeaways the second learning from the course is a prompt engineering tip and it's to surface the implied context to illustrate this imagine your vegetarian friend asks you for restaurant recommendations you instinctively reply with vegetarian friendly options even if your friend doesn't explicitly say hey idiot make sure it's vegetarian here here the fact that your friend is a vegetarian is
implied context and needs to be explicitly stated when communicating with AI tools like Chachi BT and Google Gemini another example might be you're preparing to negotiate a raise with your boss you know in your head that last year you received a 10% increase this year you're the highest performer on the team and the industry average is a 12% increase so you decide to ask for 15% raise If You Leave Out All That implied context when brainstorming negotiation techniques with an AI tool you will receive a lower quality AKA more generic output if you want to
dive deeper into this I have an entire video on how to write the perfect prompt so I'll leave a link to that down below and if you want to make a copy of my five favorite prompts for productivity I'll leave a link to my completely free workspace toolkit as well takeaway number three know when to use zero shot and few shot prompting in a nutshell the word shot simply means examples zero shot means you use a prompt with no examples one shot means you include one example few shot means you include two or more examples
for instance a zero shot example might look something like write me a pickup line for Bumble which is a completely hypothetical scenario I would never condone much less participate in a one-hot prompt would be write me a pickup line for Bumble reference this pickup line my friend used that worked well for him and you include an example of what your friend wrote A F shop prompt would look the same as one shot with just two or more examples of successful pickup lines and as you can imagine the more relevant examples you provide the AI tool
the more relevant the output and for the record if my H future wife is watching this I've obviously never done this myself this is just an example for this video as a matter of fact I don't I don't even use dating apps takeaway number four use Chain of Thought prompting for complex tasks I've talked about this concept in previous videos but I really like this simple and straightforward definition from Google's course when you divide a single task into more manageable steps you help the large language model produce accurate and consistent results a relatable real word
example would be writing a cover letter option one you share your current resume and the job description with the chatbot and just prompt it to write you a cover letter option two with Chain of Thought prompting you break the large task writing an entire cover letter into manageable steps with step one being based on my resume and the job description write an attention Gra having hook for my cover letter then after making some minor tweaks to the hook paragraph step two would be pasting that back into the chatbot and asking it for the body paragraph
rinse and repeat for the closing paragraph if you want proof that this works I have an entire video where I show job Seekers how to use Chain of Thought prompting to not only write cover letters but to also improve their resumés I'll leave a link down below takeaway number five is a topic that many of us including myself tend to overlook when using AI tools and it's to understand the limitations of AI broadly speaking there are three main limitations first the underlying data that is used to train AI models may be biased if a text
to image model is only trained on minimalistic Graphics it might not be able to produce flashy and bold designs second there simply wasn't enough information in the source training data on a given topic many AI models have a cutoff date so if you ask for something that happened recently it won't have enough data on that topic to give you an accurate accurate answer finally hallucinations are AI outputs that are straight up factually inaccurate sometimes this is a feature and not a bug when you're brainstorming new ideas for example other times hallucinations perpetuate false information so
you definitely want to double check your answer for what I call high stake tasks for example what sort of supplement or vitamin to take given your health goals when it comes to pros and cons I'm going to start with who this course is not for this course is not for you if you're already using AI tools like chpt and Google Gemini as part of your daily workflow and you're looking to dive deeper into specific AI use cases and that's because although they do a great job explaining complex topics the examples they give in the course
are pretty vague for instance in one of the lessons they gave an example where a company uses AI to decrease customer service response times and that was it that was entire example it would have been nice to dive a bit deeper and talk about whether this company used a standalone AI tool or custom AI solution how they trained the workers to use the AI system how they grounded the data so that the AI system didn't hallucinate since this was a customer service um application right so stuff like that that being said this is an excellent
beginner level course with three huge advantages first you're learning from Google employees who are established experts in the field of AI they know what they're talking about and they're not just some random person on the internet who enjoys making crass jokes second as a visual learner I'm amazed at how they're able to use Simple Graphics to explain complex topics for example they analogize AI tools and AI models to a car and its engine the model sleng engine provides the underlying capabilities while the tool like the car helps you in completing the task third the interactive
elements are surprisingly helpful the activities or homework are well-designed in that they actually help you learn a key concept from that lesson the graded assignments are also not that easy they're mainly multiple choice but you actually have to pay attention to get 80% and pass the quiz last but not least the course provides a curated list of AI tools for beginners to explore and includes a glossery of common AI terms that are now prevalent in our daily lives to sum up this course is great for beginners visual Learners and can use the legit certificate you
get the end to attract prospective employers and or Partners um if you this video helpful you might want to check out my summary of Google's free AI course that's a bit more conceptual but equally important in the meantime though as usual have a great one
