Empowering creativity by pairing digestible tech conversations with Google Cloud ingredients
Making AI Comfort Food
Navigating the world of artificial intelligence and containerization can feel like being thrown into a complex kitchen with recipes printed in a foreign language. Three letter acronyms and buzzwords like “training” and “inference” swirl around making it easy to get lost in the technical jargon. But what if we thought about AI differently? What if we made it, dare I say, digestible?
That’s precisely what we set out to do with our “Passport to Containers” series with our friends at Google Cloud. As noted in an early episode, “One thing we are really passionate about… was not just to make it digestible, cake, pun intended, and to make these conversations accessible no matter where you are on your journey.” AI shouldn’t be intimidating. It’s about empowering minds and ensuring “the next generation comes along with us.”
From Vineyards to Your Plate: AI as a Restaurant Experience
Roman Arcea put it beautifully when he likened AI to ordering fine wine and food on a night out. “There’s a lot of talk about AI… all of this is so hard. Yet, I think about it as more of a restaurant type of experience.” Think of it: winemaking is incredibly complex, “an art,” as Roman said. But when that wine arrives at your table, it becomes part of a seamless dining experience. An experience designed to pair expertly crafted wine with beautifully architected food for an intuitive meal.
He continued to build the metaphor – just like “every one of us deserves a good glass of wine with a good dish,” we all deserve to benefit from AI without having to understand the intricacies of its creation. Businesses “want to bring in this AI experience to enrich their business… But for them, it shouldn’t be that complicated.” We need to separate the creators of the “awesome wine bottle” from the consumers who simply want it to complement their meal. Google Cloud combines brilliant winemakers with appetizing developer chefs. Their team acts as sommeliers. And the rest of us are happy diners.
AI: it’s the Sauce, Not the Dish
Bobby Allen chimed in with another delicious analogy: “AI’s not the dish, it’s the sauce or the spice that makes the dish better.” Training AI is like creating the sauce, but “most of us are not going to be creating sauces, we’re going to be using sauces, which is closer to inference.” We’re enhancing what we already have, adding flavor and depth.
And Jeremy Olmsted-Thompson reminded us it needs to be intuitive. “It has to be really easy to use… without having to dig down and understand how the wine is made.” It’s about simple configuration and knowing “that it’s going to start fast enough.”
Layers of AI: Just Like Cake
Jago Macleod brought in the layers of a cake to describe the different interactions with developers and users. “It comes at different layers of the cake… We’d have direct conversations with our end users sometimes… those can get kind of spicy.” These layers represent different levels of complexity and access, from user-facing applications to deep-level development. “That’s the big push, is making the idea that inference is the next web app.”
And yes, of course we talked about literal cake. From New York cheesecake to carrot cake – aka the frosting vessel – we had a blast. As Jago pointed out, “It is a difficult choice,” but we all agreed that Crème Brûlée is definitely preferable to flan. Further proof it requires diverse minds to source the perfect recipe.
Building a Better Future
Roman’s hope for the future resonated deeply: “How can we get to those ideas faster? Can we spend more time talking to one another and building a better world?” AI should be a “programmable paintbrush,” empowering us to create more and waste less time on routine tasks. “Let’s build an orchestra,” as Roman said.
Ultimately, making AI digestible is about accessibility, empowerment, and creating a future where technology serves humanity. It’s about enjoying the meal without needing to know how every ingredient was sourced or prepared. Let’s get you a slice of that AI cake and savor the experience together.
