Towards AI’s Post

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, this course is our attempt to achieve this goal. While I love academia, when I first stepped into a startup in 2019, I 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, products, and 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. 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. The only skill required for the course is some Python (or basic 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 a portfolio project for your LLM job applications. You can find all the lesson titles and more information on the course page linked below (or comment/DM your questions!). “From Beginner to Advanced LLM Developer” is now available on the Towards AI Academy: https://lnkd.in/dQS3Gzkn #llms #llm #llmdeveloper #llmops