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The New Generative AI Function in BigQuery

How to use BigQuery GENERATE_TEXT remote function

Marina Tosic
Towards Data Science
10 min readDec 1, 2023
BigQuery generative AI ML.GENERATE_TEXT function
“Everyone can code and do NLP analysis in BigQuery with SQL knowledge and a good prompt structure” [Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash]

Introduction

Since I started working with the Google Platform, Google has not stopped surprising me with its BigQuery (BQ) features and development.

A real “wow” moment for me happened four years ago.

I remember it like it was yesterday, and I was sitting in the front row at the Big Data London 2019 conference. Little did I know back then about the possibility of creating machine learning models using only BQ functions, or, better said, what BQ Machine Learning (BQML) is.

At least until the conference session, where the Google colleague presented how you can create classification, clustering, and time-series forecasting models by simply using Google’s SQL.

The first thought that went through my mind back then was “You must be joking”.

The second thought in my head was, “Does this mean that everyone who knows only SQL will be able to create machine learning models?”

As you can assume, the answer is “yes” if you are using BigQuery as your data warehouse.

Now, after using the BQML functions for a while, the correct answer to the question listed above is “maybe.”

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

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Marina Tosic
Marina Tosic

Written by Marina Tosic

Data professional, PhD | Sharing career and hands-on stories in BI/ML/GenAI ☁️ analytics | All views are my own | Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martosi/

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