5 Key Takeaways from Google's AI Essentials Course

Last week, I spent several hours and $49 to complete Google's latest AI Essentials course for beginners. This article shares several key takeaways from the course, the pros and cons, and a definitive answer as to whether the certificate you receive at the end will indeed help you get paid more now that you have a new skill.

Takeaway #1: The Three Types of AI Tools

Broadly speaking, there are multiple types of AI tools available.

1. Standalone Tools These are AI-powered software designed to work independently with minimal setup. This category includes general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, as well as specialized apps like Spico, Otter.ai, Midjourney, and Gamma. Although they serve completely different needs, all these tools are classified as standalone because they can be accessed directly through their websites or apps and can be used without integration with other software.

2. Tools with Integrated AI Features This is in contrast to the second category, which refers to built-in enhancements within a particular piece of software. For example, after drafting a post in Google Docs, I can either copy and paste this text over to a standalone app like ChatGPT to improve my writing, or I can use the built-in or integrated Gemini for Workspace AI feature to make adjustments.

Another example would be using Midjourney as a standalone tool to generate images for a presentation, or creating an image directly within Google Slides by using Gemini for Workspace. In these instances, ChatGPT and Midjourney are Standalone AI tools, and Google Docs and Google Slides are tools with integrated AI features.

3. Custom AI Solutions A custom AI solution is an application that's tailor-made to solve a specific problem. For instance, Johns Hopkins University developed an AI system with the sole objective of detecting sepsis. This custom AI solution improved diagnostic accuracy from a mere 2-5% to an average of 40%.

If you have no technical background, you might think custom AI solutions are extremely technical and you'll probably never have to use them in the workplace. In reality, the opposite is true because well-designed custom AI solutions should require little to no technical know-how. For example, a sales team managing over 200 clients each quarter would find research on every single one time-consuming. Nowadays, there are custom AI solutions that can ingest all the information about those clients—taking into account factors like seasonality, historical data, and industry trends—and rank those clients by how likely they are to need assistance, helping the salesperson prioritize their time.

Takeaway #2: Surface the Implied Context

A key prompt engineering tip is to surface the implied context. To illustrate this, imagine your vegetarian friend asks you for restaurant recommendations. You instinctively reply with vegetarian-friendly options, even if your friend doesn't explicitly state their dietary needs. Here, the fact that your friend is a vegetarian is implied context and needs to be explicitly stated when communicating with AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

Another example might be preparing to negotiate a raise with your boss. You know that last year you received a 10% increase, this year you're the highest performer on the team, and the industry average is a 12% increase, so you decide to ask for a 15% raise. If you leave out all that implied context when brainstorming negotiation techniques with an AI tool, you will receive a lower-quality, more generic output.

Takeaway #3: Know When to Use Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Prompting

In a nutshell, the word "shot" simply means examples. - Zero-shot means you use a prompt with no examples. - One-shot means you include one example. - Few-shot means you include two or more examples.

For instance, a zero-shot example might look something like this:

"Write me a pickup line for Bumble."

A one-shot prompt would be:

"Write me a pickup line for Bumble. Reference this pickup line my friend used that worked well for him: [Example of friend's successful pickup line]."

A few-shot prompt would look the same as one-shot, but with two or more examples of successful pickup lines. As you can imagine, the more relevant examples you provide the AI tool, the more relevant the output.

Takeaway #4: Use Chain of Thought Prompting for Complex Tasks

When you divide a single task into more manageable steps, you help the large language model produce accurate and consistent results. A relatable real-world example would be writing a cover letter.

• Option One (Less Effective): You share your current resume and the job description with the chatbot and just prompt it to write you a cover letter.
• Option Two (Chain of Thought): You break the large task of writing an entire cover letter into manageable steps.
  • Step 1: "Based on my resume and the job description, write an attention-grabbing hook for my cover letter."
  • Step 2: After making some minor tweaks to the hook paragraph, you paste that back into the chatbot and ask it for the body paragraph.
  • Step 3: Rinse and repeat for the closing paragraph.

This method has been proven to be effective for not only writing cover letters but also for improving résumés.

Takeaway #5: Understand the Limitations of AI

A topic that many of us tend to overlook when using AI tools is understanding their limitations. Broadly speaking, there are several main limitations:

1. Bias in Training Data: The underlying data used to train AI models may be biased. If a text-to-image model is only trained on minimalistic graphics, it might not be able to produce flashy and bold designs.
2. Insufficient Information: There simply might not be enough information in the source training data on a given topic. Many AI models have a cutoff date, so if you ask for something that happened recently, it won't have enough data on that topic to give you an accurate answer.
3. Hallucinations: These are AI outputs that are factually inaccurate. Sometimes this is a feature, not a bug, such as when you're brainstorming new ideas. Other times, hallucinations perpetuate false information, so you definitely want to double-check your answers for what can be called "high-stakes tasks" (e.g., what sort of supplement or vitamin to take given your health goals).

Pros and Cons of the Course

Who is this course NOT for? This course is not for you if you're already using AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini as part of your daily workflow and you're looking to dive deeper into specific AI use cases. Although they do a great job explaining complex topics, the examples given in the course are pretty vague. For instance, in one of the lessons, they gave an example where a company uses AI to decrease customer service response times, and that was the entire example. It would have been nice to dive a bit deeper and talk about whether this company used a standalone AI tool or a custom AI solution, how they trained the workers to use the AI system, and how they grounded the data so that the AI system didn't hallucinate.

Who is this course FOR? That being said, this is an excellent beginner-level course with several huge advantages:

1. Expert Instructors: You're learning from Google employees who are established experts in the field of AI. They know what they're talking about.
2. Visual Learning: As a visual learner, I'm amazed at how they're able to use simple graphics to explain complex topics. For example, they analogize AI tools and AI models to a car and its engine: the model (engine) provides the underlying capabilities, while the tool (car) helps you in completing the task.
3. Helpful Interactive Elements: The activities are well-designed in that they actually help you learn a key concept from that lesson. The graded assignments are also not that easy; they're mainly multiple-choice, but you actually have to pay attention to get 80% and pass the quiz.
4. Curated Resources: The course provides a curated list of AI tools for beginners to explore and includes a glossary of common AI terms that are now prevalent in our daily lives.

To sum up, this course is great for beginners and visual learners, and you can use the legitimate certificate you get at the end to attract prospective employers.