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Udemy

A deep understanding of AI large language model mechanisms

via Udemy

Overview

Build and train LLM NLP transformers and attention mechanisms (PyTorch). Explore with mechanistic interpretability tools

What you'll learn:
  • Large language model (LLM) architectures, including GPT (OpenAI) and BERT
  • Transformer blocks
  • Attention algorithm
  • Pytorch
  • LLM pretraining
  • Explainable AI
  • Mechanistic interpretability
  • Machine learning
  • Deep learning
  • Principal components analysis
  • High-dimensional clustering
  • Dimension reduction
  • Advanced cosine similarity applications

Deep Understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs): Architecture, Training, and Mechanisms


Description

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, GPT-4, , GPT5, Claude, Gemini, and LLaMA are transforming artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning. But most courses only teach you how to use LLMs. This 90+ hour intensive course teaches you how they actually work — and how to dissect them using machine-learning and mechanistic interpretability methods.

This is a deep, end-to-end exploration of transformer architectures, self-attention mechanisms, embeddings layers, training pipelines, and inference strategies — with hands-on Python and PyTorch code at every step.

Whether your goal is to build your own transformer from scratch, fine-tune existing models, or understand the mathematics and engineering behind state-of-the-art generative AI, this course will give you the foundation and tools you need.


What You’ll Learn

  • The complete architecture of LLMs — tokenization, embeddings, encoders, decoders, attention heads, feedforward networks, and layer normalization

  • Mathematics of attention mechanisms — dot-product attention, multi-head attention, positional encoding, causal masking, probabilistic token selection

  • Training LLMs — optimization (Adam, AdamW), loss functions, gradient accumulation, batch processing, learning-rate schedulers, regularization (L1, L2, decorrelation), gradient clipping

  • Fine-tuning and prompt engineering for downstream NLP tasks, system-tuning

  • Evaluation metrics — perplexity, accuracy, and benchmark datasets such as MAUVE,HellaSwag, SuperGLUE, and ways to assess bias and fairness

  • Practical PyTorch implementations of transformers, attention layers, and language model training loops, custom classes, custom loss functions

  • Inference techniques — greedy decoding, beam search, top-k sampling, temperature scaling

  • Scaling laws and trade-offs between model size, training data, and performance

  • Limitations and biases in LLMs — interpretability, ethical considerations, and responsible AI

  • Decoder-only transformers

  • Embeddings, including token embeddings and positional embeddings

  • Sampling techniques — methods for generating new text, including top-p, top-k, multinomial, and greedy


Why This Course Is Different

  • 93+ hours of HD video lectures — blending theory, code, and practical application

  • Code challenges in every section — with full, downloadable solutions

  • Builds from first principles — starting from basic Python/Numpy implementations and progressing to full PyTorch LLMs

  • Suitable for researchers, engineers, and advanced learners who want to go beyond “black box” API usage

  • Clear explanations without dumbing down the content — intensive but approachable

Who Is This Course For?

  • Machine learning engineers and data scientists

  • AI researchers and NLP specialists

  • Software developers interested in deep learning and generative AI

  • Graduate students or self-learners with intermediate Python skills and basic ML knowledge

Technologies & Tools Covered

  • Python and PyTorch for deep learning

  • NumPy and Matplotlib for numerical computing and visualization

  • Google Colab for free GPU access

  • Hugging Face Transformers for working with pre-trained models

  • Tokenizers and text preprocessing tools

  • Implement Transformers in PyTorch, fine-tune LLMs, decode with attention mechanisms, and probe model internals

What if you have questions about the material?

This course has a Q&A(question and answer)section where you can post your questions about the course material (about the maths, statistics, coding, or machine learning aspects). I try to answer all questions within a day. You can also see all other questions and answers, which really improves how much you can learn! And you can contribute to the Q&A by posting to ongoing discussions.


By the end of this course, you won’t just know how to work with LLMs — you’ll understand why they work the way they do, and be able to design, train, evaluate, and deploy your own transformer-based language models.

Enroll now and start mastering Large Language Models from the ground up.

Syllabus

  • Introductions
  • —— ** —— Part 1: Tokenizations and embeddings —— ** ——
  • Words to tokens to numbers
  • Embeddings spaces
  • —— ** —— Part 2: Large language models —— ** ——
  • Build a GPT
  • Pretrain LLMs
  • Fine-tune pretrained models
  • Instruction tuning
  • —— ** —— Part 3: Evaluating LLMs —— ** ——
  • Quantitative evaluations
  • Qualitative evaluations
  • —— ** —— Part 4: AI safety and mechanistic interpretability —— ** ——
  • AI safety
  • Interpretability
  • —— ** —— Part 5: Observation (non-causal) mech interp —— ** ——
  • Investigating token embeddings
  • Investigating neurons and dimensions
  • Investigating layers
  • Investigating token embeddings
  • Identifying circuits and components
  • —— ** —— Part 6: Intervention (causal) mech interp —— ** ——
  • How to modify activations
  • Editing hidden states
  • Interfering with attention
  • Modifying MLP
  • —— ** —— Part 7: Python tutorial —— ** ——
  • Python intro: Colab and notebooks
  • Python intro: Data types
  • Python intro: Indexing and slicing
  • Python intro: Functions
  • Python intro: Flow control
  • Python intro: Data visualization
  • Python intro: Strings and texts
  • Python intro: Pytorch
  • —— ** —— Part 8: Deep learning intro —— ** ——
  • Math of deep learning
  • How models learn: gradient descent
  • Essence of deep learning modeling
  • Bonus content

Taught by

Mike X Cohen

Reviews

4.8 rating at Udemy based on 790 ratings

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