AI Data Cert

True Productivity with AI using LLMs

Dr Peter Baksh

AI expert with PhD in Physics, specialising in ML, generative AI, and education

We will clearly define AI, ML, NLP LLMs and DL

You will become familiar with basic AI terminology

Develop a high level understanding on how LLMs work

You will learn how LLMs work

We shall demo some example use cases for LLMs to help further your productivity

Explore example use cases with LLMs

Whether you have just discovered ChatGPT or whether you are harnessing its potential on a daily basis –&nbsp;there is so much more that you can do with Generative AI. Uncovering these capabilities is key to securing a competitive edge in your field. Learn from a lawyer who is an absolute power-user of AI and who is step-by-step transforming his own law practice and firm with AI –&nbsp;by leveraging AI for everything from client outreach (both new and existing) to effective networking post-conferences, creating compelling social media content, managing one's law practice, conducting legal research, and crafting legal advice. Many AI courses fall short: some drown you in the technical jargon of "neural networks" and "transformers," while others, taught by lawyers, only skim the surface with a bit of basic "prompt engineering." This course is totally different: it offers a perfectly balanced curriculum that combines practical, advanced AI applications with a deep understanding of the legal professional’s needs. My past attendees have come from firms such as Abreu Advogados; AKD; Arendt &amp; Medernach; Arthur Cox; Atlas; Bär &amp; Karrer; Bratschi; CBA; Charles Russell Speechlys; Corrieri Cilia; Creel; Cuatrecasas; Dickinson Gleeson; Dissmann Orth; Fischer Ramp Buchmann; GSK Stockmann; Harneys; HVK Stevens; KC Legal; KENDRIS;&nbsp;Kobre &amp; Kim; KPMG; Lenz &amp; Staehelin; Maisto e Associati; Maples Group; Marcuard Family Office; MME; Norton Rose Fulbright; Old Square Tax Chambers; Paul Hastings; POELLATH; Ruchelman; Saffery Trust; Schellenberg Wittmer; Simmons &amp; Simmons; Sorainen; Spencer West; TELLES; Thorsteinssons; Uría Menéndez; Valadas Coriel &amp; Associados; Vistra; Walkers; Wenger Plattner; Withers; Zepos &amp; Yannopoulos and many others.

Learn practical AI skills to gain a competitive advantage

Title

Course syllabus

Live classes are where you will learn everything you need to know about AI, and where you will receive small optional assignments (that you will work on outside of class)

Start at 10:00 GMT+2, or at 14:00 GMT+2

Course schedule

Lawyers who are innovative and want to boost their business development in order to get more clients.

Lawyers who are curious and want to learn how to integrate AI into their skill-set in order to become more efficient.

Lawyers who are forward-thinking and want to be ahead of the curve in order to anticipate change in the practice of law.

Who is this course for

You’ll learn

You will comprehend the capabilities and limitations of LLMs, which is essential for effectively applying them.

How Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT work

You will see practical examples of LLM usage in legal research, document drafting, contract review, due diligence, and client communications.

How to use LLMs on a daily basis

You will gain expertise in prompt engineering for LLMs, learning how to craft precise queries that yield accurate legal information without hallucinations.

How to effectively prompt LLMs in your legal practice

You will understand how you can avoid leaking private information when using LLMs and thus breaking confidentiality obligations.

How to maintain client confidentiality when interacting with LLMs

You will automate the curation and production of engaging legal content for your LinkedIn profile, enhancing your online presence and professional network.

How to automate the curation/production of content for LinkedIn
 

You will harness the power of AI for crafting personalized, persuasive business development emails at scale, enabling you to efficiently connect with potential clients.

How to do business development with AI

You will see how really easy it is to set up a ChatGPT-like LLM on your own laptop, providing you with autonomy and privacy.

How to run an LLM locally on your laptop

You will understand the difference between ChatGPT on the one hand and tools like Harvey and Legora (Leya) on the other hand.

How AI workspaces like Harvey and Legora (Leya) compare

You will learn how an AI workforce composed of autonomous agents will very soon streamline operations in your legal practice.

How an AI workforce with autonomous agents will help law firms in the future

This cutting-edge 8-hour course will help you be not one, but two steps ahead of your competition. You will be amazed what is possible.

Dr. Niklas Schmidt, partner at Wolf Theiss Attorneys-at-Law

Top ratings by hundreds of lawyers ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Cohort 13

Cohort 14

Welcome to today's most technically rigorous and hands-on Large Language Model (LLM) application course. This course is unique because each class is taught online and held with separate office hours - in total, we will conduct 15 sessions. Most courses are taught asynchronously, i.e., recorded sessions with Q&amp;A. We believe you should get what you pay for. There are 7 - 2 hr sessions for teaching and 7 office hours—1 session for DEMO DAY. We have increased our cohort to 10 weeks to allow you to learn and implement your projects thoroughly. This isn't just another AI course – it's your gateway to mastering the art and science of deploying production-grade LLM solutions that stand out in the real world. As part of Maven's Top-Rated Content, this course is designed for those who have already mastered the basics of RAG, cosine similarity, vector databases, and LLMs. We'll take you to the next level, focusing on practical aspects of packaging and deploying these models in real-world production environments. For cohort members joining this intensive learning experience, here's what you get: - 10 weeks of in-depth content in-person courses - We will teach you each class- Weekly office hours for personalized guidance- Real-world projects and challenging assignments- Guest Lectures by Leading AI Professionals- Continued support post-graduation- Lifetime access to course materials What You'll Master: Course Highlights Agents: Forget CrewAI or Autogen, build your won Agents from scratch. Learn what it takes to make an Agent from the ground. Contribute to Open Source community. Advanced RAG Solutions: Dive into enterprise-level RAG architectures and learn how to build and implement semantic caching from scratch using GCP and Redis. LLM Hosting and Deployment: Gain insights into best practices for hosting Large Language Models (LLMs) in diverse production settings, creating inference endpoints, and deploying LLMs on serverless platforms. Continual Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning: Explore advanced techniques for continual pre-training, fine-tuning LLMs, and mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Learn how to build a data pipeline for pre-training, apply causal language modeling, and leverage scaling laws. Model Merging and Mixture of Experts: Master techniques for merging multiple models to enhance their collective capabilities, including the Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach. Learn to use tools like mergekit for efficient model merging. Quantization Methods: Discover techniques to reduce model size while maintaining performance, crucial for deployment in resource-constrained environments. Inference Speed Optimization: Learn strategies to accelerate inference speeds for real-time language processing, ensuring efficient and responsive AI systems. Responsible AI Implementation: Explore ethical AI development using guardrails like NeMo, Colang, and Llama Guard to ensure AI systems align with responsible AI principles. Agentic RAG and Chunking Strategies: Implement advanced semantic chunking techniques and explore AI agent frameworks like AutoGen to enhance the capabilities of RAG systems. DSPy and Knowledge Graphs: Learn to create and utilize knowledge graphs effectively, mastering DSPy as an alternative prompting approach for structured data handling and enhanced AI interaction. Throughout the course, we will analyze state-of-the-art AI products, reverse-engineering some through Python. As a bonus, you'll have access to experimental products being developed at Traversaal.ai, my startup, allowing you to stay at the forefront of advancements in the field. Prerequisite: You should have coding experience of building RAG Solution. Understanding of Encoders and Decoders and some knowledge of Cloud Solutions and APIs. If you feel the need for a more foundational course, consider checking out my other offering on LLMs: Building LLM Applications (https://maven.com/boring-bot/ml-system-design).

Go Beyond Basic Frameworks: Build and Deploy Production-Grade AI Solutions

Provide a brief description for each module as a way to sell the value of what students will be learning throughout the course.

First Module

Second Module

Third Module

Sundays

Work in teams to build solutions, this requires engagement with other team members

Weekly projects

Machine Learning Engineer exploring different techniques to scale LLM solutions

Researcher, who would like to delve in to various aspects of open-source LLMs

Software Engineer, looking to learn how to integrate AI into their products

This course is for you if you are a:

What you’ll get out of this course

Understand and implement complex AI architectures, including enterprise-level RAG systems and agentic RAG strategies. You will also dive deep into the Mixture of Experts (MoE) technique and other model merging strategies to enhance the capabilities of your AI systems.

Advanced AI Architectures

From building semantic caches using GCP and Redis to deploying LLMs on serverless platforms like AWS Bedrock, you'll learn the practical skills to deploy and manage AI applications in real-world scenarios.&nbsp;

Practical Skills for Deployment

Acquire advanced techniques for fine-tuning LLMs, enabling you to adapt these models to specific tasks or domains and enhance their performance in targeted applications.

Fine-Tuning Expertise

Explore strategies for exploring and optimizing inference speeds, ensuring that your language models perform efficiently in real-time scenarios, a crucial skill for deploying responsive and scalable applications.

Efficient Inference Processing

Understand the importance of ethical AI development and learn to implement guardrails using tools like NeMo, Colang, and Llama Guard to ensure your AI systems align with responsible AI principles.

Knowledge of Responsible AI

Build and Optimize Production-Grade RAG and LLM Applications: Master Advanced Techniques for Scalable, Secure, and Low-Latency AI Solutions

Hamza Farooq

Cohort 5

2025-cohort-2

If you’re a software engineer or data scientist, chances are you’ve built or seen a proof of concept (POC) for a generative AI app. It’s exciting at first—an impressive demo that showcases the potential of large language models. But here’s the problem: that’s where it usually stops. These POCs often fail to scale into reliable, production-ready applications. The result? Endless iteration cycles, unreliable outputs, and frustration as teams struggle in what we call “POC purgatory.” It doesn’t have to be this way. With the right principles, processes, and workflows, you can build LLM applications that work in production – without overcomplicating pipelines or chasing trends. This course focuses on the iterative development, evaluation, and debugging practices that make AI systems production-ready. We’ll explore tools like RAG, embeddings, and agents, but the emphasis is on building scalable, robust systems – ensuring you leave with the mindset and skills to adapt as the technology evolves. You’ll not only learn how to design, test, and deploy generative AI applications, but also how to iterate and improve rapidly. This isn’t just about building something cool – it’s about creating AI systems that solve real problems, deliver real value, and scale with confidence. What to ExpectThis is a highly interactive course designed to get you results. Across live workshops, discussions, and hands-on projects, you’ll build your skills while solving real-world challenges. •	Live coding sessions to design and refine LLM applications.•	Iteration exercises to explore how small changes can dramatically improve reliability.•	Discussions on user-centric development and integrating feedback loops.•	Expert-led Q&amp;As to help you tackle your toughest challenges. What You’ll Learn •	How to transform POC demos into production-grade applications.•	Strategies for managing non-determinism and optimizing outputs through prompt engineering.•	How to monitor, log, and debug AI systems to ensure reliability and performance.•	Best practices for handling structured outputs and integrating function calling into your applications.•	Building workflows for iterative development and experimentation.•	Practical skills through hands-on app development, including creating a Generative AI app to query PDFs. Bonus Perks All students will receive - $1,000 in Modal credits for cloud compute – giving you resources to power real AI applications.- $1,000 in BaseTen credits for deploying, monitoring, and iterating on LLM-powered apps.- $300 in Google Cloud and Gemini credits for the first 100 registrants.- $100 in Mistral Credits for the first 50 registrants.- $100 in Replicate Credits for the first 50 registrants - ideal for building and deploying multimodal apps.&nbsp;- 6 months of HuggingFace Pro for the first 250 registrants - for access to models, datasets, and hosted inference.- 3-months of access to Learn Prompting Plus (valued at $117): Gain immediate access to over 20 hours of comprehensive courses in Prompt Engineering, Prompt Hacking, AI Image Generation, &amp; more!- More credits may be announced soon! Guest lectures Learn directly from leading practitioners solving real AI problems in production. These sessions focus on practical workflows, debugging strategies, and building scalable systems – not just theoretical research or cutting-edge multi-agent architectures. Enrolling will also give you access to all recorded guest lectures from Cohort 1 of this course: - Hamel Husain (Ex-Airbnb, GitHub) – Basic Data Literacy for Debugging and Evaluating LLMs&nbsp;- Swyx (Latent Space podcast, smol.ai, ai.engineer): Engineering AI Agents in 2025- Sander Schulhoff (CEO, LearnPrompting.org) – Prompt Engineering in the LLM SDLC&nbsp;- Charles Frye (Developer Advocate, Modal) – Hardware for LLM Developers- Ravin Kumar (DeepMind) – End-to-End LLM Product Development This Course Is For •	Data scientists and machine learning engineers who are sick of unreliable POCs and want to ship reliable LLM applications.•	Software engineers who want to learn how to build generative AI systems and master the LLM software development lifecycle. This Course Is Not For Those •	Looking for an introductory course in AI—some programming knowledge is required.•	Expecting ready-made solutions for AI problems without active participation.•&nbsp;Expecting deep dives into advanced evals, multi-agent systems, or large-scale RAG pipelines. This course emphasizes building and iterating on practical, production-ready systems.•	Unable to commit to hands-on projects, live discussions, and iterative development exercises. Why Take This Course By the end of this course, you’ll: •	Understand the first principles of generative AI development.•	Gain hands-on experience building robust, scalable applications.•	Learn how to troubleshoot, monitor, and optimize AI systems for production.•	Develop workflows to iterate and refine AI applications effectively.•	Leave with the confidence to deploy reliable AI systems at scale.

Ground principles that underpin successful GenAI app development

Live in person sessions. We'll finalize session times by mid-November.

Mondays and Wednesdays

To ensure hands-on practical time, there will be project work to complete throughout the course.

Data scientists, machine learning engineers who are sick &amp; tired of seeing and building prototypes &amp; want to ship reliable LLM applications

Software engineers who want to learn how to build Generative AI systems and learn the LLM software development lifecycle.

You’ve seen impressive generative AI demos—but how do you take them to production? In this course, you’ll learn the exact workflows, tools, and engineering practices needed to turn concepts into reliable, scalable applications that deliver real value.

Move beyond POCs and build production-ready AI systems

Struggling with inconsistent outputs? Through interactive exercises, you’ll explore proven techniques for optimizing prompts and ensuring your AI delivers actionable results in production settings.

Master prompt engineering for reliable results

When your AI application breaks, you’ll know exactly how to fix it. We’ll walk you through real-world debugging sessions, monitoring techniques, and tools to ensure your systems stay reliable at scale.

 Learn to debug and monitor AI systems like a pro

Want your AI to produce precise, usable results? You’ll learn how to handle structured outputs and function calls, making your applications smarter and more user-friendly.

Build smarter applications with structured outputs

Stop wasting time in endless iteration cycles. Through guided projects, you’ll discover how to set up workflows that refine your applications faster and with less frustration.

Accelerate your development process with iterative workflows

Tired of theoretical knowledge? You’ll build a fully functional app that uses text and image models to query PDFs, giving you practical experience solving complex real-world problems.

Develop hands-on expertise by building GenAI and LLM apps

Whether you’re looking to lead AI projects, impress stakeholders, or level up your technical expertise, this course gives you the tools to stand out as an AI/ML practitioner.

Advance your career with practical, proven techniques

These aren’t just skills for demos—they’re skills for delivering scalable, production-ready systems that solve real-world business challenges.

Solve Real Problems at Scale

Leave the course with a project you can add to your portfolio, demonstrate to your boss, or use to showcase your ability to deploy reliable AI systems.

Showcase Tangible Results

Build LLM-powered software reliably & from first principles. Learn the GenAI software development lifecycle: agents, evals, iteration & more

Hugo Bowne-Anderson

Host of Vanishing Gradients podcast; ex-Outerbounds; expert in DS/ML.

Stefan Krawczyk

Ex-Stitch Fix; 13+ Years building / productionizing data, ML, and AI

Cohort 1

Cohort 2

"Despite being a student in Harvard’s Master’s in Data Science program, I've struggled to understand the concepts that make LLMs so impressive. This class gave me the answers." - Tony "Ishan takes a black box, rips it apart to understandable compartments, and clearly communicates what is going on. Highly recommend." - Joe, CFO ______________________________________________________________________ The current cohort completed recording on January 17th, 2025 but you can still enroll to participate asynchronously: •&nbsp;Get lifetime access to all recorded sessions, including interactive Q&amp;A segments•&nbsp;Connect with peers in our dedicated private Discord community•&nbsp;Master the material through comprehensive quizzes and training resources•&nbsp;Receive direct instructor support via email or Discord whenever you need help•&nbsp;The option to attend a future live cohort for free______________________________________________________________________ Why This Course Stands Out: You already know how vital AI is to your career—it's in every conversation, project, and strategy session. But diving into AI feels daunting with limited time for self-study or complex programming. That’s where this course comes in. Skip the endless prep work and gain an intuitive, hands-on understanding of AI and transformers in just a few hours—without needing an advanced degree. No other course offers such an interactive, fast, and in-depth technical understanding of AI using an actual GPT-2 model, all using an easy-to-learn spreadsheet interface. ______________________________________________________________________ Perfect for Busy STEM Professionals:Whether you're a developer, technical manager, or executive, this course demystifies AI and teaches you exactly how Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-2 work, with no prerequisites beyond a STEM background. It’s ideal for: • Software/Web Developers seeking an easy introduction to machine learning. • Science &amp; Tech Professionals navigating AI transformations in their fields. • Technical Sales/Marketing crafting messaging for AI products. • Product/Project Managers overseeing LLM-powered solutions. • Executives/Leaders guiding AI strategy in their organizations. ______________________________________________________________________ What You’ll Learn:Using a unique spreadsheet implementation of GPT-2 (the predecessor to ChatGPT), we’ll break down each model component with crystal-clear explanations. In just a few sessions, you’ll be able to: • Understand how LLMs work—as quickly as possible. • Explain every key component—tokenization, embeddings, attention, and more. • Gain AI literacy—so you can confidently lead and manage AI-driven teams. • Build a foundation for further AI projects—and even more advanced learning. ______________________________________________________________________ Why Spreadsheets?You don’t need to be a coder or a calculus expert to understand AI—just the right approach. This course uses an innovative, no-code, spreadsheet-based method to teach LLMs. It's fast, interactive, and designed for busy professionals like you. By breaking down complex AI principles into easy-to-follow spreadsheet exercises, you’ll gain a lasting, foundational understanding of how large language models work. This is knowledge you can carry across into any model, any programming language, and any project. ______________________________________________________________________ Hands-On Learning, No Programming Required: By the end of the course, you’ll have a working, detailed understanding of how transformers power LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Llama. Plus, you'll have a spreadsheet tool you can explore and tweak to deepen your understanding further. ______________________________________________________________________ See it for Yourself: Still unsure? Watch the FREE lightning lesson:"Inside the Brain of an LLM: How it Works in 30 Minutes" to see how accessible AI learning can be: https://maven.com/p/eeea6f/inside-the-brain-of-an-llm-how-it-works-in-30-minutes ______________________________________________________________________ Join the Community of Learners: • “I could’ve read 20 papers on this and not gotten nearly the understanding I got from this hands-on course.”— Class Participant from Adobe • “Highly recommend this course for anyone wanting to build a foundation in LLMs. Ishan’s interactive approach makes complex concepts incredibly clear.”— Matt, Business Intelligence Analyst ______________________________________________________________________ Practical Details: • Course Access: All sessions are recorded and available to stream after the course concludes, so you’ll never miss a thing.• Reimbursement: Your company may cover this course if you're building or transitioning into AI at work. ______________________________________________________________________ New for this cohort! We've dropped the requirement for Excel. We have a browser based alternative. Some exercises may use Google Sheets and/or Python.

Skip the mountains of prep work and learn how AI works in just a few hours

If your events are recurring and at the same time, it might be easiest to use a single line item to communicate your course schedule to students

Tuesdays & Thursdays

Feel free to type out dates as your title as a way to communicate information about specific live sessions or other events.

May 7, 2022

Schedule items can also be used to convey commitments outside of specific time slots (like weekly projects or daily office hours).

Executives, engineering managers, and product managers leading and coordinating technical AI teams leveraging LLMs

Developers without formal training in machine learning that want to quickly understand the LLM technology in their projects

A gentle introduction to LLMs for professionals pivoting their career to AI from traditional software engineering or other STEM fields

Anyone who can read a spreadsheet that is motivated and deeply interested in how the next wave of computing works

This course breaks down complex AI concepts into easy-to-follow steps using Excel, making it accessible for anyone with a STEM background.

Understand how LLMs work as quickly as possible

Precisely understand in detail the architecture and function of the GPT2 model, including tokenization, embeddings, attention, multi-layer perceptron, and layernorm.

Recognize and explain every component of an LLM

You'll gain a solid understanding of how LLMs function, enabling you to confidently engage with engineers and technical stakeholders.

AI Literacy for managing technical teams

Build a foundation that equips you with the essential knowledge to explore advanced AI topics, undertake AI projects, or pursue further coursework.

Prepare yourself for further exploration, projects, or coursework in artificial intelligence

Master AI Concepts with a Real LLM Implemented Entirely in a Spreadsheet. No Complex Math. Just Clarity. 

Jan 8—17, 2025 (On-demand)

Ishan Anand

Unlock a personalized learning experience.  Dates and times will be customized to the participant.

Lightning Lessons

True Productivity with AI using LLMs