Winning Your Kid's Heart and Sparking Imagination with GenAI

AWS Hero Agustinus Nalwan (Gus) treasures spending time with his son, and would do anything to delight and surprise him. As a busy parent and an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning expert, he saw an opportunity to solve problems right at home. How could he keep his son's imagination and curiosity alive through stories every night and still manage his other priorities? He did it by building an AI comic video generator with Amazon Bedrock! The story is so heart warming and the innovation so compelling that it became the subject of a talk he gave at AWS re:Invent 2023. Below, find the recording of Gus' talk complete with how you can build something similar, and a brief interview delving into why this was important to him.

"Anyone who shows interest in tech can learn from my talk. I'd like to convince people that building AI tech does not require you to possess Phd degree nor a deep software engineering background. Framework and tools are getting easier by the day, using a few lines of code you can glue things together to get the job done. Especially using tools and services from AWS."

"The builder should focus on:

"Having some programming knowledge is likely necessary, especially for AI/ML, where Python is the preferred language. Therefore, blogs or tutorials that instruct on Python coding can be very beneficial. However, don't limit yourself to just reading or watching these tutorials. It's important to actively engage with the material. Apply what you learn by creating projects; this hands-on approach will enhance your understanding significantly."

You can check out some of the videos created by Gus' generator on his channel here or learn from him on his Medium blog.

"If I had more time I would probably take you step by step through the code within the Jupyter notebook to fine tune the Stable Diffusion 2.1 model and also the code I run to orchestrate the whole thing using AWS Batch."

What's one question you wish someone would ask you about this topic?

"How long does it take you to build Owly tech? Surprisingly it is done within less than a week, assuming 8 hours a week, 5 days a week. Most of the fine-tuning code has been prepared for you from Amazon SageMaker JumpStart."

"I am super passionate in solving problem using tech and I always like to automate as much as possible. This is the drive for me to learn more. You can automate lots of process with code but AI takes automation to the next level. It builds the algorithm for you from your training set. So obviously AI is an area I am currently passionate about."

Agustinus Nalwan is the GM of AI, Data Science and Data Platform at Carsales. He resides in Australia and lives by the motto, "Nothing is impossible. It is just not possible yet". Connect with Gus on LinkedIn or learn from him on his Medium blog.

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