00:00Last week, I spent five hours and $49 to complete Google's latest AI Essentials course for beginners.
00:06And since I need to recoup that money to fund my addiction to parasocial relationships with AI,
00:10I made this video to share five key takeaways from the course, the pros and cons, and to give
00:16you a definitive answer as to whether this certificate you receive at the end will indeed
00:21get you laid. I mean, paid, paid more because you now have a new skill. That was a weird slip of
00:28tongue there. Takeaway number one, broadly speaking, there are three types of AI tools out
00:33there. First, standalone tools are AI-powered software designed to work independently with
00:38minimal setup. This category includes general-purpose chatbots like ChachiBT, Gemini, Claude, and
00:44Perplexity, as well as specialized apps like Spico, Otter AI, Midjourney, and Gamma. Although they serve
00:50completely different needs, all these tools are classified as standalone because they can be
00:55accessed directly through their websites or apps and can be used without integration with other
01:02software. This is in contrast to the second category, tools with integrated AI features,
01:07which refers to built-in enhancements within a particular piece of software. For example,
01:13after drafting a post in Google Docs, I can either copy and paste this text over to a standalone app
01:19like ChachiBT to improve my writing, or I can use the built-in or integrated Gemini for Workspace
01:26AI feature to make adjustments. Another example would be I can either use Midjourney as a standalone tool
01:32to generate images for a presentation, or I can create an image directly within Google Slides by using
01:38again, Gemini for Workspace. In these instances, ChachiBT and Midjourney are standalone AI tools,
01:44and Google Docs and Google Slides are tools with integrated AI features. Third, a custom AI solution
01:50is an application that's tailor-made to solve a specific problem. For instance, John Hopkins University
01:57developed an AI system with the sole objective of detecting sepsis. This custom AI solution improved
02:04diagnostic accuracy from 2% to 5% to an average of 40%. And if you're like me and have no technical
02:10background, you might think, oh, custom AI solutions are extremely technical, and I'll probably
02:14never have to use them in the workplace. In reality, the opposite is true because well-designed
02:19custom AI solutions should require little to no technical know-how. For example, when I was in the
02:24sales team, I managed over 200 clients every quarter, and performing research on every single one was
02:30obviously time-consuming. Nowadays, there are custom AI solutions that can ingest all the information about
02:36those 200 clients, taking into account factors like seasonality, historical data, and industry trends,
02:41and rank those clients by how likely they are to need assistance, helping the salesperson
02:47prioritize their time. By the way, if you're thinking of buying Google's AI Essentials course,
02:52don't. Because I only found out after I paid for it, you get the AI Essentials course for free
02:57if you enroll in the Google Project Management Certification on Coursera, who is kindly sponsoring
03:03this portion of the video. Regular viewers know that I have a full-time job, and project management
03:07obviously plays a large part in my day-to-day. To be transparent, though, I'm mainly self-taught
03:13since there wasn't a go-to course back in the day. But I recently started the Project Management
03:18Certification on Coursera since it's now like the golden standard for project management. Project
03:23management is literally applicable to all industries and roles, so if you want to be more organized in
03:28the workplace, click the link below to enroll in the Google Project Management Certification,
03:33and unlock the AI Essentials course for free. Thank you, Coursera, for sponsoring this part
03:38of the video. Back to my takeaways. The second learning from the course is a prompt engineering
03:42tip, and it's to surface the implied context. To illustrate this, imagine your vegetarian friend
03:48asks you for restaurant recommendations. You instinctively reply with vegetarian-friendly
03:53options, even if your friend doesn't explicitly say, hey, idiot, make sure it's vegetarian. Here,
04:00the fact that your friend is a vegetarian is implied context, and needs to be explicitly
04:05stated when communicating with AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Another example might
04:11be you're preparing to negotiate a raise with your boss. You know in your head that last
04:16year, you received a 10% increase. This year, you're the highest performer on the team. And
04:22the industry average is a 12% increase. So you decide to ask for a 15% raise. If you leave
04:28out all that implied context, when brainstorming negotiation techniques with an AI tool, you
04:34will receive a lower quality, aka more generic output. If you want to dive deeper into this,
04:40I have an entire video on how to write the perfect prompt. So I'll leave a link to that
04:43down below. And if you want to make a copy of my five favorite prompts for productivity,
04:48I'll leave a link to my completely free workspace toolkit as well. Takeaway number three, know
04:53to use zero shot and few shot prompting. In a nutshell, the word shot simply means examples.
04:58Zero shot means you use a prompt with no examples. One shot means you include one example. Few shot
05:06means you include two or more examples. For instance, a zero shot example might look something
05:11like, write me a pickup line for Bumble, which is a completely hypothetical scenario I would never
05:16condone, much less participate in. A one shot prompt would be, write me a pickup line for Bumble. Reference,
05:22this pickup line my friend used that worked well for him. And you include an example of what your
05:27friend wrote. A few shot prompt would look the same as one shot with just two or more examples
05:32of successful pickup lines. And as you can imagine, the more relevant examples you provide the AI tool,
05:37the more relevant the output. And for the record, if my future wife is watching this, I've obviously
05:43never done this myself. This is just an example for this video. As a matter of fact, I don't, I don't even
05:49use dating apps. Takeaway number four, use chain of thought prompting for complex tasks. I've talked
05:55about this concept in previous videos, but I really like this simple and straightforward definition
05:59from Google's course. When you divide a single task into more manageable steps, you help the large
06:06language model produce accurate and consistent results. A relatable real world example would be
06:11writing a cover letter. Option one, you share a current resume and the job description with the chatbot
06:16and just prompt it to write you a cover letter. Option two, with chain of thought prompting,
06:21you break the large task, writing an entire cover letter, into manageable steps. With step one being,
06:26based on my resume and the job description, write an attention grabbing hook for my cover letter.
06:32Then after making some minor tweaks to the hook paragraph, step two would be pasting that back
06:36into the chatbot and asking it for the body paragraph. Rinse and repeat for the closing paragraph.
06:43If you want proof that this works, I have an entire video where I show job seekers how to use chain of
06:47thought prompting to not only write cover letters, but to also improve their resumes. I'll leave a link
06:52down below. Takeaway number five is a topic that many of us, including myself, tend to overlook when
06:57using AI tools, and it's to understand the limitations of AI. Broadly speaking, there are three main
07:03limitations. First, the underlying data that is used to train AI models may be biased. If a text to image
07:10model is only trained on minimalistic graphics, it might not be able to produce flashy and bold designs.
07:17Second, there simply wasn't enough information in the source training data on a given topic.
07:22Many AI models have a cutoff date. So if we ask for something that happened recently,
07:26it won't have enough data on that topic to give you an accurate answer. Finally,
07:30hallucinations are AI outputs that are straight up factually inaccurate. Sometimes this is a feature and
07:36not a bug when you're brainstorming new ideas, for example. Other times hallucinations perpetuate
07:42false information. So you definitely want to double check your answer for what I call high
07:46stake tasks. For example, what sort of supplement or vitamins to take given your health goals.
07:51When it comes to pros and cons, I'm going to start with who this course is not for. This course is not
07:56for you. If you're already using AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini as part of your daily workflow,
08:02and you're looking to dive deeper into specific AI use cases. And that's because although they do a
08:07great job explaining complex topics, the examples they give in the course are pretty vague. For instance,
08:14in one of the lessons, they gave an example where a company uses AI to decrease customer service response
08:21times. And that was it. That was an entire example. It would have been nice to dive a bit deeper and talk
08:26about whether this company used a standalone AI tool or a custom AI solution, how they train the work
08:32workers to use the AI system, how they grounded the data so that the AI system didn't hallucinate
08:39since this was a customer service application, right? So stuff like that. That being said,
08:44this is an excellent beginner level course with three huge advantages. First, you're learning
08:49from Google employees who are established experts in the field of AI. They know what they're talking
08:54about and they're not just some random person on the internet who enjoys making crass jokes.
08:59Second, as a visual learner, I'm amazed at how they're able to use simple graphics to explain
09:06complex topics. For example, they analogize AI tools and AI models to a car and its engine.
09:13The model slash engine provides the underlying capabilities while the tool, like the car,
09:19helps you in completing the task. Third, the interactive elements are surprisingly helpful.
09:24The activities or homework are well designed in that they actually help you learn a key concept
09:29from that lesson. The graded assignments are also not that easy. They're mainly multiple choice,
09:34but you actually have to pay attention to get 80% and pass the quiz. Last but not least,
09:39the course provides a curated list of AI tools for beginners to explore and includes a glossary of
09:45common AI terms that are now prevalent in our daily lives. To sum up, this course is great for beginners,
09:51visual learners, and you can use the legit certificate you get at the end to attract
09:55prospective employers and or partners. If you found this video helpful, you might want to check
10:01out my summary of Google's free AI course that's a bit more conceptual, but equally important.
10:06In the meantime, though, as usual, have a great one.
