Releasing our 90+ lesson practical LLM Developer course!

I am super excited to finally announce that we ( Towards AI ) released our first independent industry-focussed course: From Beginner to Advanced LLM Developer.

Put a dozen experts (frustrated ex-PhDs, graduates and industry) and a year of dedicated work, and you get the most practical and in-depth LLM Developer course out there (~90 lessons). It is a one-stop conversion for software developers, machine learning engineers, data scientists, aspiring founders or AI/Computer Science students. We think many millions of LLM Developers will be needed to build reliable customised products on top of foundation LLMs and achieve mass GenAI adoption at companies. We want to help you lead this new field!

One of the reasons I quit my PhD in AI (one year + 8 days ago) was to build practical solutions that will help others in the real world and improve what exists. Along with our book “Building LLMs for Production,” this course is our attempt to achieve this goal. While I love the world of academia, when I first stepped into the startup world in 2019, it felt like I pretty much knew nothing all over again. I needed to understand the problems in the real-world application of AI and build solutions for it. Not just research but real models, real products, and real people using them. But here’s the thing: grasping these challenges is merely the first step. For the ‘how’ part of it, you need to get into the code, the architecture, the models, the APIs, the deployments, the trials and errors, and the complex and wide varieties of frameworks — you don’t have time to reinvent the wheel in a startup! This discrepancy between academia and the industry is even worse in the LLM era.

Here is our platform introduction video to give you more context on our goal with the Towards AI Academy:

So we’ve gathered everything we worked on building products and AI systems and put them into one super practical industry-focused course. Right now, this means working with Python, OpenAI, Llama 3, Gemini, Perplexity, LlamaIndex, Gradio, and many other amazing tools (we are unaffiliated and will introduce all the best LLM tool options). It also means learning many new non technical skills and habits unique to the world of LLMs.

Even though the course is super practical (oriented towards building a real-world project), we believe the course teaches concepts that will stay relevant for a long time even as LLMs get better, such as reducing hallucinations, customising to specific companies and tasks, teaching how to work with them, some cool theory, practical tips and more.

The only skill required for the course is some Python (or programming) knowledge.

We cover the full stack of learning to build on top of foundation LLMs — from choosing a suitable LLM application to collecting data, iterating on many advanced techniques (RAG, fine-tuning, agents, audio, caching), integrating industry expertise and deploying. Our students will create a working product, which we certify, and we also provide instructor support in our dedicated Discord channel. This could become the seed of a startup, a new tool at your company or portfolio project for your LLM job applications.

Here is the introduction video for this first course of ours:

You can find all the lesson titles and more information on the course page (or DM me).

“From Beginner to Advanced LLM Developer” is now available on the Towards AI Academy: https://tinyurl.com/5n9y32y4

Happy learning!

p.s. we do offer discounts for bundles and for students. Message me about that!

p.s.2. the ebook “building llms for production” is also available on the Towards AI Academy, here.