Andrew Ng and John Maeda announce a new course on Microsoft's Semantic Kernel SDK for business leaders. Learn to build LLM plugins, work with prompts and memory, and bridge the gap between technical and business teams without needing to code from scratch.
I'm excited to be here with John Maeda, VP of Design and AI at Microsoft, to announce our latest course, how business thinkers can start building AI Plugins with Semantic Kernel. Microsoft has been developing an SDK, a software development kit called Semantic Kernel, which enables someone with a product or business orientation to make use of large language models or LLMs. In particular, this course will go through how to use LLMs using to flesh out business ideas. John is one of the legendary designers in the tech and AI world, so I was really thrilled when you agreed to teach this. So John, tell us about how LLMs can be used for business thinking.
Absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you, Andrew. I'm so happy working on this with you. You are someone I've admired for so long. In this course you're going to explore and use two large language model plugins to help a business leader. A design thinking plugin will be used and a business thinking plugin. The Semantic Kernel, we call it sk, is a lightweight SDK developed by Microsoft and also the open source community. It lets you mix conventional programming languages like C Sharp, Python, Java, whatever with the latest in AI prompts, prompt templating, chaining and planning capability. You're going to start by building some semantic functions to summarize some text and then learn how to change semantic functions to enhance their effects. Then you're going to start on design thinking, that is learning to empathize with customers and to find their issues using an AI plugin. We're going to work from top down to apply analysis to small business owners using a business thinking AI plugin to find ways to improve cost and time efficiency. Also that's two plugins and these things are going to lead into two techniques we use around vector or semantic memory and also using AI to do planning.
So lots of exciting topics and I think it's really powerful to combine these different types of thinking that often happens in different departments in maybe a company. If business leaders can augment their skills with knowing how to think about LLMs and developers and engineers can learn more about successful business strategies, then we're teams that are better able to communicate and speak with each other and ultimately create better outcomes. So this short course is a bit different than many of the others you may have seen by Deep learned AI and his partners. But I think this will be one of the most thrilling short courses and I hope you sign up and that you enjoy it.
