Preface

Transformer-driven Generative AI models are a game-changer for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and computer vision. Large Language Generative AI transformer models have achieved superhuman performance through services such as ChatGPT with GPT-4V for text, image, data science, and hundreds of domains. We have gone from primitive Generative AI to superhuman AI performance in just a few years!

Language understanding has become the pillar of language modeling, chatbots, personal assistants, question answering, text summarizing, speech-to-text, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and more. The expansion from the early Large Language Models (LLMs) to multimodal (text, image, sound) algorithms has taken AI into a new era.

For the past few years, we have been witnessing the expansion of social networks versus physical encounters, e-commerce versus physical shopping, digital newspapers, streaming versus physical theaters, remote doctor consultations versus physical visits, remote work instead of on-site tasks, and similar trends in hundreds more domains. This digital activity is now increasingly driven by transformer copilots in hundreds of applications.

The transformer architecture began just a few years ago as revolutionary and disruptive. It broke with the past, leaving the dominance of RNNs and CNNs behind. BERT and GPT models abandoned recurrent network layers and replaced them with self-attention. But in 2023, OpenAI GPT-4 propelled AI into new realms with GPT-4V (vision transformer), which is paving the path for functional (everyday tasks) AGI. Google Vertex AI offered similar technology. 2024 is not a new year in AI; it’s a new decade! Meta (formerly Facebook) has released Llama 2, which we can deploy seamlessly on Hugging Face.

Transformer encoders and decoders contain attention heads that train separately, parallelizing cutting-edge hardware. Attention heads can run on separate GPUs, opening the door to billion-parameter models and soon-to-come trillion-parameter models.

The increasing amount of data requires training AI models at scale. As such, transformers pave the way to a new era of parameter-driven AI. Learning to understand how hundreds of millions of words and images fit together requires a tremendous amount of parameters. Transformer models such as Google Vertex AI PaLM 2 and OpenAI GPT-4V have taken emergence to another level. Transformers can perform hundreds of NLP tasks they were not trained for.

Transformers can also learn image classification and reconstruction by embedding images as sequences of words. This book will introduce you to cutting-edge computer vision transformers such as Vision Transformers (ViTs), CLIP, GPT-4V, DALL-E 3, and Stable Diffusion.

Think of how many humans it would take to control the content of the billions of messages posted on social networks per day to decide if they are legal and ethical before extracting the information they contain.

Think of how many humans would be required to translate the millions of pages published each day on the web. Or imagine how many people it would take to manually control the millions of messages and images made per minute!

Imagine how many humans it would take to write the transcripts of all of the vast amount of hours of streaming published per day on the web. Finally, think about the human resources that would be required to replace AI image captioning for the billions of images that continuously appear online.

This book will take you from developing code to prompt engineering, a new “programming” skill that controls the behavior of a transformer model. Each chapter will take you through the key aspects of language understanding and computer vision from scratch in Python, PyTorch, and TensorFlow.

You will learn the architecture of the Original Transformer, Google BERT, GPT-4, PaLM 2, T5, ViT, Stable Diffusion, and several other models. You will fine-tune transformers, train models from scratch, and learn to use powerful APIs.

You will keep close to the market and its demand for language understanding in many fields, such as media, social media, and research papers, for example. You will learn how to improve Generative AI models with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), embedding-based searches, prompt engineering, and automated ideation with AI-generated prompts.

Throughout the book, you will work hands-on with Python, PyTorch, and TensorFlow. You will be introduced to the key AI language understanding neural network models. You will then learn how to explore and implement transformers.

You will learn the skills required not only to adapt to the present market but also to acquire the vision to face innovative projects and AI evolutions. This book aims to give readers both the knowledge and the vision to select the right models and environment for any given project.