LLM Engineering - Master AI and LLMs

Before the Setup instructions - a special note

Early on in the course (on Day 2), I give a demo of a very cool, popular product called Claude Code. It's an AI coding tool, similar to Cursor that we use on the course. I'm only showing this as an example of Agentic AI in action; it's not a tool that's covered explicitly on this course, particularly as we're in Cursor. But if you want to use Claude Code yourself, the Quick Start guide from Anthropic is here.

An important point on API costs (which are optional! No need to spend if you don't wish)

During the course, I'll suggest you try out the leading models at the forefront of progress, known as the Frontier models. I'll also suggest you run open-source models using Google Colab. These services have some charges, but I'll keep cost minimal - like, a few cents at a time. And I'll provide alternatives if you'd prefer not to use them.

Please do monitor your API usage to ensure you're comfortable with spend; I've included links below. There's no need to spend anything more than a couple of dollars for the entire course. Some AI providers such as OpenAI require a minimum credit like $5 or local equivalent; we should only spend a fraction of it, and you'll have plenty of opportunity to put it to good use in your own projects. During Week 7 you have an option to spend a bit more if you're enjoying the process - I spend about $10 myself and the results make me very happy indeed! But it's not necessary in the least; the important part is that you focus on learning.

Free alternative to Paid APIs

See Guide 9 in the guides directory for the detailed approach with exact code for Ollama, Gemini, OpenRouter and more!

How this Repo is organized

There are folders for each of the "weeks", representing modules of the class, culminating in a powerful autonomous Agentic AI solution in Week 8 that draws on many of the prior weeks.
Follow the setup instructions above, then open the Week 1 folder and prepare for joy.

The most important part

The mantra of the course is: the best way to learn is by DOING. I don't type all the code during the course; I execute it for you to see the results. You should work along with me or after each lecture, running each cell, inspecting the objects to get a detailed understanding of what's happening. Then tweak the code and make it your own. There are juicy challenges for you throughout the course. I'd love it if you wanted to submit a Pull Request for your code (see the Github guide in the guides folder) and I can make your solutions available to others so we share in your progress; as an added benefit, you'll be recognized in GitHub for your contribution to the repo. While the projects are enjoyable, they are first and foremost designed to be educational, teaching you business skills that can be put into practice in your work.

Starting in Week 3, we'll also be using Google Colab for running with GPUs

You should be able to use the free tier or minimal spend to complete all the projects in the class. I personally signed up for Colab Pro+ and I'm loving it - but it's not required.

Learn about Google Colab and set up a Google account (if you don't already have one) here

The colab links are in the folders for Week 3 and Week 7 - if you open up the lab for each day, you'll find a direct link to the colab.

Monitoring API charges

You can keep your API spend very low throughout this course; you can monitor spend at the dashboards: here for OpenAI, here for Anthropic.

The charges for the exercsies in this course should always be quite low, but if you'd prefer to keep them minimal, then be sure to always choose the cheapest versions of models:

1. For OpenAI: Always use model gpt-4.1-nano in the code
2. For Anthropic: Always use model claude-3-haiku-20240307 in the code instead of the other Claude models
3. During week 7, look out for my instructions for using the cheaper dataset