Meet AI
Build the big picture: AI history, the evolution from symbolic systems to deep learning, and why modern LLMs work.
Explore the complete journey behind modern AI — from the foundations and architecture that make a model possible, through training and inference, to complete AI systems and production engineering.
One primary home for each concept. Learn the fundamentals, understand the model, then build real systems.
The dashboard and detailed roadmap share one numbering system: 00–07. Career growth and live labs are supporting resources across the tracks.
Build the big picture: AI history, the evolution from symbolic systems to deep learning, and why modern LLMs work.
Build the mathematical and programming foundations needed to understand learning, vectors, optimization and neural networks.
Follow text into tokens, vectors and embeddings; then understand recurrent models, attention, QKV, Transformers and GPT.
Understand how raw data becomes a trained, aligned and deployable language model across 14 connected stages.
Trace a user question through tokenization, embeddings, Transformer computation, next-token prediction and response delivery.
Connect models to external knowledge, context, tools and actions with RAG, vector databases, agents and MCP.
Move from experiments to reliable AI services with evaluation, safety, efficient models, optimized inference and production operations.
Explore reasoning models, multimodal architectures, diffusion, Vision Transformers, Mixture of Experts and open research questions.
Training creates the model. Inference uses the trained model to produce an answer.
How the model learns patterns, acquires capabilities and has its weights updated.
How a deployed model processes a prompt and generates a response using fixed model weights.
Two different operating modes of the same model lifecycle.
| Dimension | Model training | Model inference |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Learn patterns and adjust model parameters. | Use learned parameters to process an input and produce output. |
| Input | Prepared training examples and targets. | User prompt, instructions, history and other context. |
| Computation | Forward pass, loss, backpropagation and optimizer updates. | Forward computation and next-token probability calculation. |
| Weights | Updated during training. | Normally fixed for a deployed model version. |
| Output | Trained model checkpoint / artifacts. | Generated response. |
| Frequency | Development or post-training runs. | Every request / generation session. |
The 18 steps provide a chronological study order. The eight tracks remain the main curriculum structure; this sequence does not create a second numbering system.
Build the mental model and understand the evolution of modern AI.
Before Step 01Explore track →Python, math, linear algebra & probability, ML fundamentals, deep learning & backprop.
Steps 01–05Explore track →NLP sequences, tokenization, embeddings, Transformers, QKV attention and GPT architecture.
Steps 06–10Explore track →LLM pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, RLHF and DPO alignment.
Steps 11–13Explore 14-stage pipeline →Inference, decoding, probability sampling and KV-cache acceleration.
Step 14Explore 11-stage pipeline →RAG, embeddings for retrieval, vector databases, chunking, reranking and hybrid search.
Step 15Explore track →Evaluation & safety, quantization & optimization, deployment & serving.
Steps 16–18Explore track →Reasoning, multimodal models, diffusion, MoE and research directions.
Advanced extension beyond the 18-step sequenceExplore track →Explore working visualizations, run hands-on experiments, and turn concepts into small implementations.
Follow an input prompt through an end-to-end visual playground, from system framing and token IDs to attention, sampling and the final synthesized response.
Focused playgrounds for understanding how language models process inputs and generate outputs.
19 stages · full transformer walkthrough
Q·K scores · scaling · softmax · animated stages
8-step math · QKV projection · scores · softmax
Temperature · logits · softmax · sampling
Open Lab →Live input · token counts · BPE intuition
Open Lab →Dot product · Euclidean · cosine similarity
Open Lab →Context changes meaning · cosine comparison
8 stages · multi-head attention · FFN · residuals
Interactive sentence routes · QKV vectors · 6-layer stack
8 steps · logits · temperature · top-k · top-p
Think · Act · Observe · Repeat
Open Lab →Continue into implementation projects, connected learning spaces and progress tools.
Shared concepts such as tokenization are taught once, then referenced from training and inference.
Every important topic should lead to a tangible experiment, not just a reading checklist.
The inference walkthrough and existing topic lessons remain intact while the curriculum is reorganized.