Google Cloud Summit Returns to Sydney: AI Takes Center Stage, Developers Get Hands-On
Google Cloud Summit Sydney Through the Eyes of a Developer: AI, Innovation, and Community
Yesterday I was invited to come to Sydney to attend & host a hands on lab at the “annual” Google Cloud Sydney Summit, although, there’s been a five year hiatus since the pandemic, and last year was in Melbourne. Summit is an event hosted at the ICC with a number of talks, presentations, demos and workshops showing the latest and greatest of what’s new with the Google Cloud platform (GCP) along with the usual sponsor booths showcasing their products and/or services they offer with the platform.
The event itself is aimed at mostly technical leaders in organisations to get a huge download of what’s new, and how GCP solutions can work for their business, along with a number of talks from customers about how they’ve used Google to bring their ideas to life, or how they’ve solved a particular problem. Being across most of what’s new, I particularly like to hear about war stories, and how businesses are solving problems with the product suites available on clouds, even if they’re multi-cloud and how they’re using the same products I’ve used in their own way.
And there’s a lot of Australian businesses using the platform too! After speaking with a number of leaders in those businesses throughout the day, I found that many are already using the cloud, but because AWS had the first mover advantage, they mostly had their compute on there. However they’d come to Google for the data and analytics capabilities that are available, with the big draw-card being BigQuery. As they have started to use it more, their developers have been telling them they prefer using Google Cloud for the developer experience and ease of use.
This year they had five tracks with a big focus on, you guessed it, AI. For me, AI is kind of one of those things that isn’t really directly solving any problems for my area of work and expertise, yet. I think that time will come soon, but right now, for me at least, it’s mostly a buzzword that has a lot of people thinking about how they can use it to get competitive advantage in the market. Even in the non AI tracks much of the talks and topics had a lot of focus on AI. Given Google’s heavy focus on it in all of their products, it’s inevitable that at a Google event in recent memory and into the future, that there will be a heavy AI focus on their content. The next few images show the tracks with the talk titles that were available, illustrating my point.
And now, to the lab!
I was fortunate enough to be able to host developers and enthusiasts for a hands-on technical lab session to help attendees learn about prompt design with AI tools and how they can learn about the various offerings available on GCP to figure out how to get the most out of large language models and providing different contexts and prompts to garner different results from the same general questions.
Below are the list of labs that were running throughout the day.
From all accounts, the labs were actually really well received! I was helping out in one session, but talking to the facilitators of other sessions, it sounded like there was a lot of success in the other labs too. On a personal note, helping someone with prompt design, where they were able to articulate or frame the question to the LLM input in such a way that gave them different answers to the same overall question. This was a light-bulb moment for many of the lab attendees and they came away with that extra bit of knowledge on how to use the AI tools on offer by Google. Here’s hoping some awesome apps come out of the lab workshoppers in the future!
If you missed the labs, and would like to have a crack at it, you can find the labs here which you’re welcome to complete at your pace. You can find the lab about prompt design here: https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/paths/118/course_templates/976/labs/466368