What I learnt in the 5-Day Gen AI Intensive Course with Google

Ever feel like you're building AI agents on shaky ground? Like one wrong user input could send the whole thing crashing down? That's how it felt before diving into Google's 5-Day Gen AI Intensive Course. The course wasn't just about vibe-coding; it was about understanding the fundamentals. For example, NotebookLM helped demystify the transformer architecture, revealing the "why" behind prompt successes and failures. And the prompting fundamentals codelab shed light on crucial parameters like temperature, top-k, and top-p, showing how they control output randomness and creativity. It's about moving from guesswork to informed decisions, crafting agents with intention.

The real game-changer was the evaluation codelab. Forget manually checking agent outputs! This is where autoraters and structured outputs come in, allowing you to programmatically verify if your agent is hallucinating or staying on track. Plus, understanding embeddings finally clicked. Sure, you might have used Chroma and vector stores before, but did you truly grasp why certain searches failed? Building a document Q&A system with RAG from scratch highlights the importance of chunk sizing, overlap strategies, and how embedding quality directly impacts retrieval. The course also explored the power of multi-agent systems, state machines, and agent loops for handling complex, multi-turn conversations without losing context—crucial for creating truly intelligent and responsive agents.

The course also touched on domain-specific LLMs and MLOps. It's all about filling those knowledge gaps and understanding how to deploy and manage your AI agents effectively. While a hands-on deployment sandbox would have been a great addition, the course provided a solid foundation for understanding the current landscape of AI agent development. The key takeaway? AI agents are more than just cool tech; they're a rapidly evolving field with the potential to transform how we interact with technology in our daily lives. By understanding the fundamentals and embracing best practices, we can move beyond building houses of cards and create truly robust and reliable AI agents.

📰 Original article: https://dev.to/ritampal26/what-i-learnt-in-the-5-day-gen-ai-intensive-course-with-google-2akn

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