{"id":1557,"date":"2026-01-27T19:33:37","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T14:03:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/?page_id=1557"},"modified":"2026-10-24T13:35:27","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T08:05:27","slug":"large-language-models-crash-course","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/home\/books-ive-authored\/large-language-models-crash-course\/","title":{"rendered":"Large Language Models Crash Course"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-gallery has-nested-images columns-default is-cropped wp-block-gallery-1 is-layout-flex wp-block-gallery-is-layout-flex\">\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1991\" height=\"2560\" data-id=\"1559\" src=\"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llm-1-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1559\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llm-1-scaled.jpg 1991w, https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llm-1-233x300.jpg 233w, https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llm-1-796x1024.jpg 796w, https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llm-1-768x987.jpg 768w, https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llm-1-1195x1536.jpg 1195w, https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llm-1-1593x2048.jpg 1593w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1991px) 100vw, 1991px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1991\" height=\"2560\" data-id=\"1616\" src=\"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llmback-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1616\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llmback-scaled.jpg 1991w, https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llmback-233x300.jpg 233w, https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llmback-796x1024.jpg 796w, https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llmback-768x987.jpg 768w, https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llmback-1195x1536.jpg 1195w, https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/llmback-1593x2048.jpg 1593w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1991px) 100vw, 1991px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The era of the API wrapper is over. The era of the AI Engineer has begun.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Most developers are stuck in the &#8220;Prompt Engineering&#8221; trap. They write scripts that send data to a Black Box and hope for the best. They are passengers in the AI revolution, not drivers. This book changes that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Large Language Models Crash Course is a hands-on, line-by-line masterclass in the physics of Artificial Intelligence. We strip away the marketing hype, open the hood, and build a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) from absolute scratch using Python and PyTorch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You will not just learn how it works\u2014you will build the engine that makes it work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The engineering portfolio:&nbsp;<\/strong>By the end of this book, you will have architected the following system:&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table is-style-regular has-small-font-size\"><table class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color has-fixed-layout\" style=\"border-width:1px\"><thead><tr><th><strong>The phase<\/strong><\/th><th><strong>The component<\/strong><\/th><th><strong>What you will build<\/strong><\/th><\/tr><\/thead><tbody><tr><td>Interface<\/td><td>The Tokenizer<\/td><td>Build a custom&nbsp;Byte-Pair Encoder (BPE)&nbsp;to translate English to Integers<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Body<\/td><td>The Architecture<\/td><td>Manually stack the 12-Layer&nbsp;Transformer,&nbsp;Self-Attention, and&nbsp;LayerNorm<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Mind<\/td><td>Pre-Training<\/td><td>Implement the&nbsp;Training Loop&nbsp;to minimize&nbsp;Cross-Entropy Loss<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Voice<\/td><td>The Generator<\/td><td>Code the&nbsp;Temperature&nbsp;&amp;&nbsp;Top-K Sampling&nbsp;logic to control creativity<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Specialist<\/td><td>Fine-Tuning<\/td><td>Swap the model head to build a military-grade Spam Detector<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Alignment<\/td><td>Instruct-Tuning<\/td><td>Domesticate the model using the&nbsp;Alpaca Dataset&nbsp;to follow commands<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Finale<\/td><td>S&amp;V CORTEX<\/td><td>Build a Full-Stack GUI App to chat with PDF documents locally<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Instant access to code:<\/strong>&nbsp;Download all codes, including the finale application!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stop calling OpenAI. Start building your own.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group is-nowrap is-layout-flex wp-container-core-group-is-layout-7387b849 wp-block-group-is-layout-flex\">\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-thumbnail ticss-4bbf5ca5\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.shroffpublishers.com\/index.php?dispatch=attachments.getfile&amp;attachment_id=3775\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/TOC-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1600\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/TOC-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/TOC-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/TOC.jpg 360w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-thumbnail ticss-dc129f0f\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.shroffpublishers.com\/books\/9789368083795\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/cart-150x150.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1625\" style=\"object-fit:cover\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The era of the API wrapper is over. The era of the AI Engineer has begun. Most developers are stuck in the &#8220;Prompt Engineering&#8221; trap. They write scripts that send data to a Black Box and hope for the best. They are passengers in the AI revolution, not drivers. This [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":68,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1557","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1557"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2554,"href":"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1557\/revisions\/2554"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/68"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharanamshah.com\/mymusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}