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Building LLMs for Production

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English
Paid

Creating LLM for Production is a comprehensive 470-page guide (updated in October 2024) crafted for developers and specialists aiming to transcend prototyping and develop robust, industry-ready applications based on large language models.

Understanding the Fundamentals of LLMs

This guide elucidates the core principles of how large language models (LLMs) operate, providing a solid foundation for building advanced applications.

Key Techniques Explored

The book delves into a variety of essential techniques needed to harness the full potential of LLMs, including:

  • Advanced Prompting: Mastering the art of effectively instructing LLMs to achieve precise outcomes.
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Exploring techniques that combine information retrieval and generative models.
  • Model Fine-Tuning: Detailed methods for customizing LLMs to specific tasks or domains.
  • Evaluation Methods: Comprehensive approaches for assessing model performance and accuracy.
  • Deployment Strategies: Proven tactics for integrating LLMs into live production environments.

Practical Tools and Resources

Readers benefit from hands-on resources, including:

  • Interactive Colab Notebooks for practical experimentation.
  • Real-world code examples to illustrate key concepts in action.
  • Case Studies that demonstrate how to successfully integrate LLMs into existing products and workflows.

Addressing Critical Challenges

This guide also pays special attention to:

  • Security: Safeguarding applications and data when using LLMs.
  • Monitoring: Keeping track of model performance and system health.
  • Optimization: Enhancing efficiency and effectiveness of LLM implementations.
  • Cost Reduction: Strategies to minimize operational costs in LLM deployment.

About the Authors

Louis-François Bouchard

Louis-François Bouchard thumbnail

Louis-François Bouchard is a French-Canadian AI engineer and educator behind the What's AI newsletter and YouTube channel — one of the more accessible explainer sources on modern AI research. He is also the lead instructor for several courses on the Towards AI platform, where he teaches the production-engineering side of LLM applications.

His CourseFlix listing carries six Louis-François Bouchard courses spanning the applied AI track: Building LLMs for Production, 10-Hour LLM Fundamentals, Build Your First Product with LLMs / Prompting / RAG, Master AI for Work, Beginner Python Primer for AI Engineering, and the Agentic AI Engineering Course.

Material is paid and aimed at engineers picking up applied LLM work as a serious skill. For broader content, see CourseFlix's LLMs & Fundamentals, RAG, and AI Agents category pages.

Towards AI

Towards AI thumbnail

Towards AI is one of the larger AI-focused publishers on the open web — originally a Medium publication and now a multi-author content platform plus a paid course catalog focused on production LLM engineering. The brand has tracked the post-ChatGPT generative-AI wave from inside the field rather than from a generic SaaS-marketing perspective.

The CourseFlix listing reflects their applied focus: Building LLMs for Production, 10-Hour LLM Fundamentals, Build Your First Product with LLMs, Prompting, RAG, the Agentic AI Engineering Course, Beginner Python Primer for AI Engineering, and Master AI for Work. Material is paid and aimed at engineers who already know Python and want to ship production AI features rather than read a survey of the field.

Books

Read Book Building LLMs for Production

#TitleTypeOpen
1Table of Contents PDF
2About The Book PDF
3Introduction PDF
4Why Prompt Engineering, Fine-Tuning, and RAG? PDF
5Coding Environment and Packages PDF
6A Brief History of Language Models PDF
7What are Large Language Models? PDF
8Building Blocks of LLMs PDF
9Tutorial: Translation with LLMs (GPT-3.5 API) PDF
10Tutorial: Control LLMs Output with Few-Shot Learning PDF
11Recap PDF
12Understanding Transformers PDF
13Transformer Model’s Design Choices PDF
14Transformer Architecture Optimization Techniques PDF
15The Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) Architecture PDF
16Introduction to Large Multimodal Models PDF
17Proprietary vs. Open Models vs. Open-Source Language Models PDF
18Applications and Use-Cases of LLMs PDF
19Recap PDF
20Understanding Hallucinations and Bias PDF
21Reducing Hallucinations by Controlling LLM Outputs PDF
22Evaluating LLM Performance PDF
23Recap PDF
24Prompting and Prompt Engineering PDF
25Prompting Techniques PDF
26Prompt Injection and Security PDF
27Recap PDF
28Why RAG? PDF
29Building a Basic RAG Pipeline from Scratch PDF
30Recap PDF
31LLM Frameworks PDF
32LangChain Introduction PDF
33Tutorial 1: Building LLM-Powered Applications with LangChain PDF
34Tutorial 2: Building a News Articles Summarizer PDF
35LlamaIndex Introduction PDF
36LangChain vs. LlamaIndex vs. OpenAI Assistants PDF
37Recap PDF
38What are LangChain Prompt Templates PDF
39Few-Shot Prompts and Example Selectors PDF
40What are LangChain Chains PDF
41Tutorial 1: Managing Outputs with Output Parsers PDF
42Tutorial 2: Improving Our News Articles Summarizer PDF
43Tutorial 3: Creating Knowledge Graphs from Textual Data: Finding Hidden Connections PDF
44Recap PDF
45LangChain’s Indexes and Retrievers PDF
46Data Ingestion PDF
47Text Splitters PDF
48Similarity Search and Vector Embeddings PDF
49Tutorial 1: A Customer Support Q&A Chatbot PDF
50Tutorial 2: A YouTube Video Summarizer Using Whisper and LangChain PDF
51Tutorial 3: A Voice Assistant for Your Knowledge Base PDF
52Tutorial 4: Preventing Undesirable Outputs with the Self-Critique Chain PDF
53Tutorial 5: Preventing Undesirable Outputs from a Customer Service Chatbot PDF
54Recap PDF
55From Proof of Concept to Product: Challenges of RAG Systems PDF
56Advanced RAG Techniques with LlamaIndex PDF
57RAG - Metrics & Evaluation PDF
58LangChain LangSmith and LangChain Hub PDF
59Recap PDF
60What are Agents: Large Models as Reasoning Engines PDF
61An Overview of AutoGPT and BabyAGI PDF
62The Agent Simulation Projects in LangChain PDF
63Tutorial 1: Building Agents for Analysis Report Creation PDF
64Tutorial 2: Query and Summarize a DB with LlamaIndex PDF
65Tutorial 3: Building Agents with OpenAI Assistants PDF
66Tutorial 4: LangChain OpenGPT PDF
67Tutorial 5: Multimodal Financial Document Analysis from PDFs PDF
68Recap PDF
69Understanding Fine-Tuning PDF
70Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) PDF
71Tutorial 1: SFT with LoRA PDF
72Tutorial 2: Using SFT and LoRA for Financial Sentiment PDF
73Tutorial 3: Fine-Tuning a Cohere LLM with Medical Data PDF
74Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback PDF
75Tutorial 4: Improving LLMs with RLHF PDF
76Recap PDF
77Model Distillation and Teacher-Student Models PDF
78LLM Deployment Optimization: Quantization, Pruning, and Speculative Decoding PDF
79Tutorial: Deploying a Quantized LLM on a CPU on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) PDF
80Deploying Open-Source LLMs on Cloud Providers PDF
81Recap PDF
82Conclusion PDF
83Further Reading and Courses PDF

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Frequently asked questions

What is Building LLMs for Production about?
Creating LLM for Production is a comprehensive 470-page guide (updated in October 2024) crafted for developers and specialists aiming to transcend prototyping and develop robust, industry-ready applications based on large language models…
Who teaches this course?
It is taught by Louis-François Bouchard, Towards AI. You can find more courses by these instructors on the corresponding source pages.
How long is the course?
It is delivered as a self-paced online course on CourseFlix.
Is it free to watch?
It is part of CourseFlix's premium catalog. A subscription unlocks the full video player; the course description, table of contents, and preview information are available to everyone.
Where can I watch it online?
The course is available to watch online on CourseFlix at https://courseflix.net/course/building-llms-for-production. The page hosts every lesson with the integrated video player; no download is required.