Google hosted this AI in Action training lab at Westin Hotel, not sure why not in one of its many buildings.
I arrived a few minutes before 1:30pm, just before the lab supposed to start. Surprised to see so few attendees (6? 7?), and out of them, I knew 2. They are organizers of GDG Seattle. Seems the goal today is introducing AlloyDB AI and Vertex AI Agent Builder to create an AI agent for a shopping chatbot. Reference: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/generative-ai
First lab is using simple SQL in Google's AlloyDB to set up tables and embedding. However, for these training accounts, it times out so quickly, that we could only load 8 rows of data. 2nd lab is building the AI agent using the model setup in lab #1. If you are not familiar with Google Cloud, it's hard to find where things are. There were 3 Google employees (other than the 2 teaching the labs) onsite to troubleshooting our errors (usually caused by missing steps of the labs or things changed since the labs were tested). We ended with a quiz and a survey. Everyone got a pair of very colorful socks. (why socks?)
At the end, they laid out 2 stations of food in the next room, and a drink station.
I was astonished to see this much food for so few people, especially, there were almost nothing during the first two "refreshment" timeslots.
One cool thing is that 2 artists were hired to draw cartoons of us. I received 2 very colorful drawings. They are very fast.
