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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI Foundations Associate (1Z0-1122-26)

1Z0-1122-26 Cheat Sheet

1Z0-1122-26 Tests Picking the Right Learning Type and OCI Service — Not Coding

An entry-level exam for anyone new to AI on Oracle Cloud. Half is vendor-neutral AI, ML, DL and LLM vocabulary; the rest maps a business input, such as a call recording, invoice or photo, to the right OCI service.

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Among the harder certs
Avg: Not published by Oracle
Pass: 750 / 1000
Most candidates understand Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI Foundations Associate (1Z0-1122-26) concepts — and still fail. This exam tests how you apply knowledge under pressure.

1Z0-1122-26 Topic Map

Section names come from secondary sources and Oracle publishes no weights; the seven sections are grouped into six here. Forty definition-level items in 60 minutes: a one-line business example asks which learning type, architecture or OCI feature fits.

  1. 01
    AI and ML Foundations (weight not published) — AI vs. ML vs. DL, data types, supervised vs. unsupervised vs. reinforcement, regression vs. classification
  2. 02
    Deep Learning Foundations (weight not published) — neurons, activations, backpropagation, CNNs for grids, RNNs and LSTMs for sequences
  3. 03
    Generative AI and LLMs (weight not published) — tokens, temperature, top-k vs. top-p, transformers, prompting vs. RAG vs. fine-tuning
  4. 04
    OCI AI Portfolio (weight not published) — AI services vs. OCI Data Science vs. Oracle Machine Learning, GPU shapes, Supercluster, responsible AI
  5. 05
    OCI Generative AI and Oracle Database AI (weight not published) — on-demand vs. dedicated AI clusters, Select AI actions, Vector Search
  6. 06
    OCI AI Services (weight not published) — Language, Vision, Document Understanding and Speech features

Wrong instinct vs correct approach

A contact centre wants sentiment per topic from recorded customer calls
✕ Wrong instinct

Send the audio files straight to OCI Language

✓ Correct approach

OCI Language expects text. Transcribe first with OCI Speech, typically as batch jobs on files in Object Storage, then run aspect-based sentiment in OCI Language, which scores each topic mentioned separately.

A bank's data scientists must build models on customer data that may not leave the database
✕ Wrong instinct

Load the data into OCI Data Science notebooks

✓ Correct approach

Oracle Machine Learning runs in-database through SQL, Python and R, so data never moves. OCI Data Science suits open-source Python workflows with notebooks, model catalog and deployments, but requires loading data into the platform.

Analysts want Select AI to show them the SQL it would generate before anything runs
✕ Wrong instinct

Use the default action and read the query log

✓ Correct approach

runsql is the default and executes the query. showsql returns the generated SQL without running it; explainsql explains it; narrate turns results into prose; chat skips SQL generation entirely.

A model scores 99% on training data but performs poorly on new customer records
✕ Wrong instinct

Deploy it because training accuracy is high

✓ Correct approach

This is overfitting: the model memorized training data. Add more data, simplify the model or apply regularisation, and judge it on held-out data. Inference never improves the model; only training changes weights.

Know these cold

  • ▸ All production AI today, including LLMs, is narrow AI; AGI remains hypothetical
  • ▸ Rule-based systems count as AI even though they never learn from data
  • ▸ Supervised needs labels; unsupervised finds groups; reinforcement learns a policy from rewards
  • ▸ CNNs share filter weights across image positions; pooling downsamples feature maps
  • ▸ Plain RNNs suffer vanishing gradients; LSTM input, forget and output gates keep longer context
  • ▸ Without activation functions, stacked layers collapse into one linear model
  • ▸ Top-k limits sampling by token count; top-p limits it by cumulative probability
  • ▸ Encoders produce embeddings for search; decoders power most chat LLMs
  • ▸ OCI stack — I in apps, AI services, ML services, AI infrastructure such as Supercluster
  • ▸ Removing one sensitive column rarely removes bias, which usually starts in training data

Can you answer these without checking your notes?

In this scenario: "A contact centre wants sentiment per topic from recorded customer calls" — what should you do first?
OCI Language expects text. Transcribe first with OCI Speech, typically as batch jobs on files in Object Storage, then run aspect-based sentiment in OCI Language, which scores each topic mentioned separately.
In this scenario: "A bank's data scientists must build models on customer data that may not leave the database" — what should you do first?
Oracle Machine Learning runs in-database through SQL, Python and R, so data never moves. OCI Data Science suits open-source Python workflows with notebooks, model catalog and deployments, but requires loading data into the platform.
In this scenario: "Analysts want Select AI to show them the SQL it would generate before anything runs" — what should you do first?
runsql is the default and executes the query. showsql returns the generated SQL without running it; explainsql explains it; narrate turns results into prose; chat skips SQL generation entirely.

Common Exam Mistakes — What candidates get wrong

Calling logistic regression a regression algorithm because of its name

Logistic regression is a classifier: a sigmoid outputs a probability and a threshold turns it into a class. Regression predicts a continuous number. With no labels at all, the answer is clustering such as k-means, not classification.

Choosing image classification when the business needs to count or locate items

OCI Vision image classification labels the whole image and answers what, not where. Object detection returns bounding boxes for each item. A custom Vision model, trained on your labelled images without code, is needed for your own products.

Picking plain OCR text when a system needs invoice totals and dates

OCI Document Understanding key-value extraction returns named fields for receipts, invoices and IDs, and table extraction preserves rows and columns. Vision text detection only returns raw lines and positions, which downstream systems cannot use directly.

Expecting on-demand OCI Generative AI to support fine-tuning

On-demand mode is pay-per-use inference on shared capacity with pretrained models. Fine-tuning and hosting custom models require a dedicated AI cluster, which reserves GPU capacity for one tenancy and gives predictable throughput.

Using a chat model to create vectors for semantic search

Embedding models turn text into numeric vectors for semantic search and RAG; chat models generate text. In the database, the VECTOR data type stores embeddings beside business data, with HNSW or IVF indexes for approximate search.

Resources to help you pass OCI AI Foundations Associate on your first attempt

1Z0-1122-26 rewards matching each business input to the right service. Check your readiness today.