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Joseph Santarcangelo and Roodra Pratap Kanwar

This IBM short course, a part of Generative AI Engineering Essentials with LLMs Professional Certificate, will teach you the basics of using generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). This course is suitable for existing and aspiring data scientists, machine learning engineers, deep-learning engineers, and AI engineers.

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This IBM short course, a part of Generative AI Engineering Essentials with LLMs Professional Certificate, will teach you the basics of using generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). This course is suitable for existing and aspiring data scientists, machine learning engineers, deep-learning engineers, and AI engineers.

You will learn about the types of generative AI and its real-world applications. You will gain the knowledge to differentiate between various generative AI architectures and models, such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Transformers, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs), and Diffusion Models. You will learn the differences in the training approaches used for each model. You will be able to explain the use of LLMs, such as Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT).

You will also learn about the tokenization process, tokenization methods, and the use of tokenizers for word-based, character-based, and subword-based tokenization. You will be able to explain how you can use data loaders for training generative AI models and list the PyTorch libraries for preparing and handling data within data loaders. The knowledge acquired will help you use the generative AI libraries in Hugging Face. It will also prepare you to implement tokenization and create an NLP data loader.

For this course, a basic knowledge of Python and PyTorch and an awareness of machine learning and neural networks would be an advantage, though not strictly required.

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What's inside

Syllabus

Generative AI Architecture
In this module, you will learn about the significance of generative AI models and how they are used across a wide range of fields for generating various types of content. You will learn about the architectures and models commonly used in generative AI and the differences in the training approaches of these models. You will learn how large language models (LLMs) are used to build NLP-based applications. You will build a simple chatbot using the transformers library from Hugging Face.
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Suitable for existing and aspiring data scientists, machine learning engineers, deep learning engineers, and AI engineers
Taught by Joseph Santarcangelo and Roodra Pratap Kanwar, who are recognized for their work in NLP
Part of Generative AI Engineering Essentials with LLMs Professional Certificate
Provides hands-on experience with Generative AI libraries in Hugging Face

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Reviews summary

Practical generative ai foundations

According to students, this course offers a largely positive introduction to Generative AI and LLMs, focusing on architecture and data preparation. Learners appreciate the comprehensive coverage of various generative AI models like Transformers and GANs, alongside practical tokenization methods and the use of PyTorch DataLoaders. The hands-on chatbot project with Hugging Face is highlighted as particularly useful for applying concepts. While it serves as a concise yet effective overview, learners suggest that prior basic knowledge of Python and PyTorch is beneficial for maximizing the learning experience.
Best suited for those with a solid ML/Python foundation.
"As an aspiring data scientist, I found the pace just right, especially with my prior ML knowledge."
"For someone new to PyTorch, I might recommend brushing up on basics first, even if not 'strictly required'."
"I think this course is perfect for machine learning engineers looking to specialize in generative AI."
Delivers essential concepts effectively in a short format.
"It's a great short course to get up to speed on the fundamentals of generative AI and LLMs."
"I found the modules to be 'bite-sized' and easy to digest, covering a lot without feeling rushed."
"While not exhaustive, it provided enough depth to understand core concepts and prepare for more advanced study."
Includes practical implementation with a simple chatbot.
"Building the simple chatbot using the transformers library was a great way to apply what I learned."
"The project gave me confidence in using Hugging Face for real-world applications."
"I appreciated the direct application of theory through the chatbot exercise."
Offers a solid foundational overview of generative AI models.
"I really appreciated the broad coverage of different generative AI architectures like GANs and Diffusion models."
"The course clearly explained the differences between various LLMs such as GPT and BERT."
"I now have a much clearer understanding of how various generative AI models are trained and applied."
Provides practical skills in tokenization and data handling.
"The tokenization module was incredibly hands-on, showing me how to implement it with different libraries."
"Learning about PyTorch DataLoader and creating custom collate functions was very valuable for my projects."
"I found the sections on Hugging Face libraries immediately applicable to building NLP systems."

Activities

Be better prepared before your course. Deepen your understanding during and after it. Supplement your coursework and achieve mastery of the topics covered in Generative AI and LLMs: Architecture and Data Preparation with these activities:
Review Python and PyTorch basics
Reviewing these topics will help you refresh your understanding of the core concepts used in this course.
Browse courses on Python
Show steps
  • Go through online tutorials or documentation on Python and PyTorch.
  • Complete practice exercises or coding challenges to test your understanding.
Mentor a junior student in generative AI
Mentoring others will reinforce your understanding of generative AI and help you develop your communication and leadership skills.
Browse courses on Generative AI
Show steps
  • Reach out to junior students or peers who are interested in generative AI.
  • Provide guidance on topics such as model selection, training techniques, and evaluation metrics.
  • Review their code, provide feedback, and help them troubleshoot any issues.
Attend a workshop on generative AI applications
Attending a workshop will expose you to real-world use cases and industry best practices in generative AI.
Browse courses on Generative AI
Show steps
  • Research and identify upcoming workshops on generative AI.
  • Register for a workshop that aligns with your interests and learning goals.
  • Attend the workshop, actively participate in discussions, and take notes.
Four other activities
Expand to see all activities and additional details
Show all seven activities
Follow tutorials on generative AI models
Following tutorials will provide you with hands-on experience in implementing and training generative AI models.
Browse courses on Generative AI
Show steps
  • Identify relevant tutorials from reputable sources such as Coursera, edX, or YouTube.
  • Go through the tutorials step-by-step, implementing the code and experimenting with different parameters.
  • Document your learnings and any challenges you faced during the tutorials.
Practice tokenization and data loading techniques
Practicing these techniques will improve your proficiency in preparing data for generative AI models.
Browse courses on Tokenization
Show steps
  • Find datasets suitable for generative AI tasks, such as text generation or image synthesis.
  • Implement tokenization methods using libraries like spaCy or Hugging Face's Tokenizers.
  • Create data loaders using PyTorch's DataLoader class to handle data efficiently.
  • Experiment with different tokenization and data loading parameters to optimize your models.
Develop a research proposal on a generative AI topic
Writing a research proposal will challenge you to think critically about generative AI's potential and applications.
Browse courses on Generative AI
Show steps
  • Identify a specific research question or problem you want to address.
  • Review existing literature and research on generative AI.
  • Develop a research methodology and plan for your proposed study.
  • Write a research proposal outlining your research question, methods, and expected outcomes.
Build a simple NLP application using a pre-trained language model
Building an NLP application will allow you to apply your understanding of generative AI in a practical context.
Browse courses on NLP
Show steps
  • Choose a specific NLP task, such as text classification or question answering.
  • Select a pre-trained language model from Hugging Face or other providers.
  • Fine-tune the model on your dataset using transfer learning techniques.
  • Deploy your NLP application and evaluate its performance.

Career center

Learners who complete Generative AI and LLMs: Architecture and Data Preparation will develop knowledge and skills that may be useful to these careers:

Reading list

We've selected 50 books that we think will supplement your learning. Use these to develop background knowledge, enrich your coursework, and gain a deeper understanding of the topics covered in Generative AI and LLMs: Architecture and Data Preparation.
Co-authored by creators of the Hugging Face ecosystem, the revised edition serves as the definitive practitioner manual for training, fine-tuning, and deploying encoder-decoder and decoder-only transformers. Readers dissect multi-head self-attention, tokenization pipelines, and model quantization through production PyTorch code.
Demystifies transformer internals by guiding engineers step by step through coding a GPT-style architecture in pure PyTorch without relying on high-level library abstractions. Covers causal self-attention, positional embeddings, layer normalization, pretraining loops, and instruction fine-tuning on consumer hardware.
Provides a deep dive into variational deep learning, including VAEs, and their applications. It is written by leading researchers in the field and is suitable for advanced students and researchers.
Renowned for intuitive visual pedagogy, Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst illustrate how representation and generation transformers process tokens, contextual embeddings, and dense retrieval vectors. Ideal for developers seeking rigorous geometric intuition alongside practical semantic search and fine-tuning workflows.
Dives specifically into security tokens and the tokenization of financial assets using blockchain technology. It's highly relevant for understanding the practical applications of tokenization in the finance industry, including raising capital and investing. It provides insights into the potential of tokenization to transform traditional finance.
Bridges foundational transformer architecture with production systems engineering, examining how attention bottlenecks, KV-cache memory footprints, and context length constraints govern real-world deployment. Equips practitioners to evaluate foundation models, architect retrieval-augmented pipelines, and optimize inference latency.
Focused specifically on GANs, this book provides a practical, hands-on approach to building and training GANs. It covers the core architecture and various applications through numerous examples. is particularly useful for those who want to move beyond theory and implement GAN models, making it a strong additional reading or primary text for a practical course on GANs.
Focuses on the application of tokenization to real-world assets for wealth creation. It explains the principles, benefits, and process of asset tokenization across various classes like real estate and commodities. It's valuable for understanding the investment potential and practicalities of RWA tokenization.
A practical guide focusing on implementing generative AI models, including diffusion models and transformers. is suitable for those who want to gain hands-on experience with building and fine-tuning these models using code examples. It bridges the gap between theory and application, making it a valuable resource for students and professionals looking to apply diffusion models in practice.
Provides a practical guide to using generative AI, covering the different techniques and tools available. It is written by two leading experts in the field, Josh Patterson and Adam Gibson.
Expands beyond text-only models to demonstrate how Vision Transformers (ViT), CLIP, and multimodal architectures unify image patch embeddings with sequence attention. Includes hands-on notebooks covering BERT, GPT-4, Hugging Face pipelines, and cross-modal representation learning.
This foundational textbook in Natural Language Processing that provides a comprehensive overview of the field. It covers fundamental concepts including tokenization, providing essential background knowledge for anyone studying NLP. While comprehensive, it can be challenging for beginners due to its depth and breadth. The latest draft edition incorporates recent advancements.
Provides a broad understanding of the concept of tokens beyond cryptocurrencies and explores their potential to create new economic systems in the Web3 era. It is essential for grasping the diverse applications and implications of tokenization in finance and digital assets. It offers a strong theoretical framework and examines various use cases.
Establishes the mathematical bedrock of sequence modeling, optimization, and representation learning that motivated the shift from recurrent networks and sequence-to-sequence attention to modern transformers. Indispensable for mastering backpropagation, regularization, and probabilistic deep learning.
Aims to bridge the gap between the theory and practical application of GANs. It covers fundamental methodologies, mathematical concepts, and real-world projects. It is designed to be accessible to both beginners and experienced practitioners, offering a well-rounded understanding of GANs and their implementation using popular deep learning platforms. It serves as a useful reference for applying GANs in various scenarios.
Offers a practical approach to building blockchain applications and includes a dedicated chapter on the tokenization of assets. It helps solidify understanding by demonstrating how tokenization works in practice on a blockchain platform like Ethereum. It's a useful resource for those who want to move from theory to implementation.
Offers a mathematically lucid, modern graduate treatment of dot-product self-attention, multi-head projections, positional encodings, and residual connections. Connects transformer mechanics directly to graph neural networks, diffusion models, and overparameterized optimization dynamics.
Addresses data security and privacy-preserving techniques, including tokenization, in the context of managing data assets. It's highly relevant for understanding how tokenization is used beyond finance for protecting sensitive information. It provides practical lessons and strategies for implementing data protection measures.
Walks through an end-to-end LLMOps pipeline for customizing and serving transformer models in production. Details parameter-efficient fine-tuning with LoRA and QLoRA, preference alignment with DPO, dataset curation, and high-throughput vLLM inference serving.
Explores the landscape of generative AI with a focus on practical implementation using Python and TensorFlow. It covers GANs along with other generative models like VAEs and Transformers, providing code examples and exploring various applications such as image and text generation. It's a valuable resource for understanding contemporary generative AI topics and gaining hands-on experience.
This set of books offers a comprehensive look at data privacy and security, including the role of tokenization in protecting sensitive data. It's a valuable reference for understanding the application of tokenization in data security strategies and compliance requirements across various industries.
Synthesizes transformer internals with enterprise software architecture, breaking down attention variants, tokenization trade-offs, domain fine-tuning, and KV-cache inference optimization. Equips engineers to build dependable LLM pipelines using retrieval-augmented generation, structured outputs, routing cascades, and systematic failure mitigation.
This practical guide focuses on implementing GANs using the Keras library. It provides step-by-step instructions and hands-on projects, making it ideal for learners who prefer a code-centric approach to understanding GANs. It's a valuable resource for solidifying understanding through practical application and is well-suited as additional reading for a course with a programming component.
Offers a practical introduction to NLP using the Python programming language and the NLTK library. It covers tokenization as a fundamental text processing step with hands-on examples. It's particularly useful for those who want to apply NLP concepts and gain practical skills. While an excellent introduction, it may not delve into the most advanced contemporary topics.
Provides a statistical perspective on VAEs, making them accessible to a broad audience. It is written by two leading researchers in the field and is suitable for both beginners and experienced researchers.
Provides a comprehensive overview of approximate Bayesian inference, including VAEs. It is written by two leading researchers in the field and is suitable for advanced students and researchers.
Discusses the digitization and tokenization of real-world assets, providing insights into the business requirements and use cases for tokenization projects. It offers a perspective on the potential scale and impact of asset tokenization on various industries and investment classes.
Provides a comprehensive overview of various deep generative models, including GANs, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), and flow-based models. It delves into the theoretical foundations and mathematical details of these models. It is suitable for graduate students and researchers who want to gain a deeper understanding of the broader field of deep generative modeling, with GANs as a key component.
Provides a deep dive into variational methods for stochastic partial differential equations, including VAEs. It is written by three leading researchers in the field and is suitable for advanced students and researchers.
Provides a gentle introduction to VAEs, making them accessible to a broad audience. It is written by a leading researcher in the field and is suitable for beginners and experienced researchers alike.
While not solely focused on diffusion models, this widely-used textbook on deep learning includes updated content on generative AI, including diffusion models, in its third edition. It is an excellent resource for building a strong foundation in deep learning concepts and practical implementation using Keras and TensorFlow, which are essential prerequisites for understanding and working with diffusion models.
This influential book explores the broader potential of blockchain technology to disrupt various industries, including finance. It provides context for why tokenization revolutionary concept by highlighting the capabilities of distributed ledgers. While not solely focused on tokenization, it's a must-read for understanding the technological shift enabling it.
This project-based book provides practical examples of building various GAN models using TensorFlow and Keras. It's useful for gaining hands-on experience and seeing how GANs can be applied to different tasks. While it might not provide extensive theoretical depth, it's an excellent resource for understanding the practical implementation of contemporary GAN architectures.
Explores both foundational and advanced topics in NLP, including fundamental text processing techniques like tokenization and contemporary approaches. It provides a broad overview of the field and its applications, suitable for gaining a solid understanding of NLP tokenization within a wider context.
Catalogs the architectural taxonomy of over sixty transformer variants across efficient sparse attention, cross-lingual pretraining, time-series forecasting, and protein folding. Combines formal architectural diagrams with comparative empirical benchmarks and PyTorch case studies.
Covers advanced deep learning techniques using Keras, including topics like autoencoders, GANs, and variational autoencoders. It is suitable for those with a foundational understanding of deep learning and Keras who want to explore more advanced generative models and their implementations. It can be a valuable resource for deepening understanding and exploring more complex GAN architectures.
Guides practitioners from foundational self-attention mathematics and query-key-value projections to fine-tuning modern Hugging Face transformer families. Covers encoder-only, decoder-only, and multimodal variants alongside practical scaling, quantization, and inference optimization techniques.
A comprehensive guide to blockchain technology, covering distributed ledgers, decentralization, and smart contracts. Understanding these core concepts is essential for a deep understanding of how tokenization functions within blockchain networks. provides detailed explanations of the underlying technology.
Places autoregressive GPT models and encoder-decoder transformers in direct dialogue with variational autoencoders, GANs, and denoising diffusion models. Shows practitioners how attention mechanisms power both text generation and conditioning layers inside modern image synthesis systems.
Provides a business-oriented perspective on generative AI, discussing its potential impact on industries and how companies can use it to gain a competitive advantage. It is written by three leading experts in the field, Thomas Davenport, Rajeev Ronanki, and Nitin Mittal.
Provides a thought-provoking exploration of the future of generative AI, discussing its potential benefits and risks. It is written by Gary Marcus, a leading researcher in the field.
Investigates how reward modeling, representation bias, and inverse reinforcement learning shape the safety and ethics of large neural sequence models. Provides crucial sociotechnical context for engineers aligning pretrained transformers with human intent.
Offers an introduction to GANs, covering the foundational concepts and gradually moving towards more advanced topics and architectures. It aims to provide a clear understanding of how GANs work and how to implement them. It can be a good resource for those looking to gain a solid understanding of the core principles before exploring more specialized areas.
This interactive book provides a comprehensive introduction to deep learning, covering both theory and implementation. It includes relevant sections on generative models, which can help contextualize GANs within the broader field of deep learning. It's a valuable resource for both learning and referencing, suitable for a range of audiences from undergraduate to professional.
Offers an accessible introduction to the field of generative AI, explaining core concepts including how models learn and their societal impact. While it may not delve deeply into the technical specifics of diffusion models, it provides essential context and a foundational understanding of the broader field that diffusion models belong to, making it suitable for beginners and those interested in the implications of generative AI.
Offers a clear and accessible introduction to the fundamental concepts of Bitcoin and blockchain technology. Understanding blockchain is foundational to understanding tokenization in the context of digital assets and finance. This book provides the necessary prerequisite knowledge without being overly technical.
A beginner-friendly guide that covers fundamental NLP concepts, including tokenization, stemming, and lemmatization. is ideal for those new to NLP and provides a practical starting point for understanding how text data is processed before analysis or modeling. It's a good resource for gaining a broad understanding of the initial steps in NLP.
Examines how cross-encoders, bi-encoders, ColBERT late interaction, and dense passage retrieval transformed modern search engines. Essential reading for engineers building neural information retrieval and high-precision reranking stages for RAG architectures.
Presented in a cookbook format, this book offers a collection of recipes for building and training different types of GANs. It's a practical resource for quickly implementing specific GAN architectures and techniques. It's best used as a supplementary resource for gaining practical skills and exploring various GAN implementations.

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