10-Hour LLM Fundamentals

Source: https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/llm-primer

The intensive course “LLM Basics in 10 Hours” will teach you to understand and use large language models in real projects. You will find out when it is best to use prompting, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), fine-tuning, or agents, and why these approaches work. You will gain a basic “LLM Developer Toolkit”: customization, databases, frameworks, fine-tuning, quality assessment, and security. Through practical examples, we will demonstrate how to design end-to-end workflows, integrate ChatGPT and other models into work processes, create multi-step agents, and optimize models for specific tasks and domains. The course will help turn ideas into AI products: from the first prototypes to reliable solutions using modern techniques (distillation, quantization, RLHF, protection against prompt-hacking). The program is designed for developers and IT specialists but will be useful to anyone who wants to master LLMs—from understanding their limitations to creating their own solutions. Preliminary knowledge is not required (Python is helpful but not mandatory).