Generative AI in Action

Generative AI can transform your business by streamlining the process of creating text, images, and code. This book will show you how to get in on the action!

Generative AI in Action is an engaging, practitioner-focused companion that reveals how large language models drive transformative software solutions. Building on Amit Bahree’s extensive background in AI and machine learning, it illustrates core concepts by demonstrating text, image, and even music generation—spotlighting the versatility of these models. Beyond the technical fundamentals, it delves into deployment best practices, performance considerations, and ethical responsibilities, ensuring you’re well-prepared to bring generative AI into enterprise contexts with confidence.

Inside Generative AI in Action you will find:

• A practical overview of of generative AI applications
• Architectural patterns, integration guidance, and best practices for generative AI
• The latest techniques like RAG, prompt engineering, and multi-modality
• The challenges and risks of generative AI like hallucinations and jailbreaks
• How to integrate generative AI into your business and IT strategy

Generative AI in Action is full of real-world use cases for generative AI, showing you where and how to start integrating this powerful technology into your products and workflows. You’ll benefit from tried-and-tested implementation advice, as well as application architectures to deploy GenAI in production at enterprise scale.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the technology

In controlled environments, deep learning systems routinely surpass humans in reading comprehension, image recognition, and language understanding. Large Language Models (LLMs) can deliver similar results in text and image generation and predictive reasoning. Outside the lab, though, generative AI can both impress and fail spectacularly. So how do you get the results you want? Keep reading!

About the book

Generative AI in Action presents concrete examples, insights, and techniques for using LLMs and other modern AI technologies successfully and safely. In it, you’ll find practical approaches for incorporating AI into marketing, software development, business report generation, data storytelling, and other typically-human tasks. You’ll explore the emerging patterns for GenAI apps, master best practices for prompt engineering, and learn how to address hallucination, high operating costs, the rapid pace of change and other common problems.

What’s inside

• Best practices for deploying Generative AI apps
• Production-quality RAG
• Adapting GenAI models to your specific domain

About the reader

For enterprise architects, developers, and data scientists interested in upgrading their architectures with generative AI.

About the author

Amit Bahree is Principal Group Product Manager for the Azure AI engineering team at Microsoft.

The technical editor on this book was Wee Hyong Tok.

Table of Contents

Part 1
1 Introduction to generative AI
2 Introduction to large language models
3 Working through an API: Generating text
4 From pixels to pictures: Generating images
5 What else can AI generate?
Part 2
6 Guide to prompt engineering
7 Retrieval-augmented generation: The secret weapon
8 Chatting with your data
9 Tailoring models with model adaptation and fine-tuning
Part 3
10 Application architecture for generative AI apps
11 Scaling up: Best practices for production deployment
12 Evaluations and benchmarks
13 Guide to ethical GenAI: Principles, practices, and pitfalls
A The book’s GitHub repository
B Responsible AI tools