AI Engineering

AI301: Introduction to Modern Artificial Intelligence

Course Description
Welcome to AI301: Intro to Modern Artificial Intelligence. The course is designed to provide technical individuals with basic knowledge of mathematics and programming, skills to build, maintain, and serve AI powered tools. We will start our exploration in the field of AI by diving into the history of the field so participants can develop an intuitive understanding of the technology before starting hands-on exploration. We will create a simple neural network as a starting point building up to participants building (or finetuning) their very own small language model. The business applications part of the course will consist of emulating real world business problems and solving them using modern AI tools and techniques. The course will culminate into a deep dive into AI agents. Participants will learn to create AI agents that operate autonomously, perceive their environment, persist over a prolonged time, adapt to change, and create and pursue goals.

Course Outcome
Participants after completing the course will be well versed in modern AI technologies and will be able to solve real world business problems using AI. Participants will be well versed in the following topics:
History of AI
Basic of deep learning
Pytorch for Deep learning 
The Transformers Architecture
Pre-training of LLMs
Training a Small Language Model
Large Language Models
Vision Language Models
Speech Models
Huggingface Transformers Library
How to use open-source AI models 

Fine-tuning open-source AI models
Supervised finetuning
Unsupervised Finetuning
Reinforcement learning though Human Feedback
Direct Preference Optimization
Parameter efficient fine-tuning
Prompt Tuning
Prefix Tuning
Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA)

Serving LLMs using inference libraries.
Inference optimization:
Distilling LLMs
Quantization

Agentic AI
Simple reflex agents
Model-based reflex agents
Goal-based agents
Utility-based agents
Learning agents

AI orchestration using multi-agent systems 
Cloud AI-ops for serving AI systems
AWS AI solutions
Azure AI solutions