Preface
I have earned my living as an artificial intelligence practitioner since 1982 using the Common Lisp and Python languages. I cover Common Lisp in another book Loving Common Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer’s Secret Weapon that overlaps some of the main themes in this book. This book is meant to broadly cover techniques for using Python for a wide range of artificial intelligence applications.
Professionally, I have used Python for data manipulation for a Knowledge Graph while working at Google, various deep learning consulting jobs, managing a deep learning team at Capital One, and writing recommendation systems at Baby List.
I hope you find this book both interesting and deeply practical.
You might want to visit my website https://markwatson.com.
Programming Examples in this Book
- TBD
Working with the examples
I prefer using the Miniconda Python package manager. If you prefer other Python package managers like pyenv or poetry you should have no problems with the book examples since each book project has a requirements.txt file listing dependencies.
Some of the examples use third party services like OpenAI’s GPT-3 APIs but for these example projects I take care to show sufficient output for you to understand the examples even if you don’t sign up for the free services I use in the use examples.
I have set up the deep learning examples in this book using Google’s Colaboratory that supports Python Jupyter notebooks and provides free access to GPUs and TPUs for training deep learning models.
A Request from the Author
I spent time writing this book to help you, dear reader. I release this book under the Creative Commons license and set the minimum purchase price to $6.00 in order to reach the most readers. Under this license you can share a PDF version of this book with your friends and coworkers. You can also reuse the material in this book for any purpose (including commercial use) with attribution to the author. If you found this book on the web (or it was given to you) and if it provides value to you then please consider doing one of the following to support my future writing efforts and also to support future updates to this book:
- Purchase a copy of this book at https://leanpub.com/python-ai
- Buy one of my other eBooks available at https://leanpub.com/mark-watson
- Hire me as a consultant
I enjoy writing and your support helps me write new editions and updates for my books and to develop new book projects. Thank you!
Credits
I would like to thank the following people for their help:
Carol Watson: structural and copy editing.