AI Crash Course to help busy builders catch up to the public frontier of AI research in 2 weeks
About: Coderplex is a community platform for self-learning developers. We help people learn modern technologies and accelerate in their careers. This repo is setup as a Fork of the AI Crash Course repo by @henrythe9th, which we find to be a good summary of fundamental guides and research papers to quickly catch up with the frontiers of AI today. We have expanded the below list of resources with our own references and recommendations for tools that you can explore and use to build AI solutions.
Start Here:
Neural Network -> LLM Series
Then get up to speed via Survey papers:
- Follow the ideas in the survey paper that interest you and dig deeper
LLM Survey - 2024
Agent Survey - 2023
Prompt Engineering Survey - 2024
AI Papers: (prioritize ones with star *)
Foundational Modelling:
Transformers* (foundation, self-attention) - 2017
Scaling Laws/GPT3* (conviction to scale up GPT2/3/4) - 2020
LoRA (Fine tuning) - 2021
Training Compute-Optimal LLMs - 2022
RLHF* (InstructGPT->ChatGPT) - 2022
DPO (No need for RL/Reward model) - 2023
LLM-as-Judge (On par with human evaluations) - 2023
MoE (MIxture of Experts) - 2024
Planning/Reasoning:
AlphaZero/MuZero* (RL without prior knowledge of game or rules) - 2017/2019
CoT* (Chain of Thought)/ToT (Tree of Thoughts)/GoT (Graph of Thoughts)/Meta CoT - 2022/2023/2023/2025
ReACT (Generate reasoning traces and task-specific actions in interleaved manner) - 2022
Let’s Verify Step by Step (Process > Outcome) - 2023
ARC-Prize* (Latest methods for solving ARC-AGI problems) - 2024
Scaling Test-Time Compute (Relationship between inference-time and pre-training compute) - 2024
DeepSeek R1 (Building OSS o1-level reasoning model with pure RL, no SFT, no RM) - 2025
Applications:
Toolformer (LLMs to use tools) - 2023
GPT4 (Overview of GPT4, but fairly high level) - 2023
Llama3* (In depth details of how Meta built Llama3 and the various configurations and hyperparameters) - 2024
Gemini1.5 (Multimodal across 10MM context window) - 2024
Deepseekv3 (Building a frontier OSS model at a fraction of the cost of everyone else) - 2024
SWE-Agent/OpenHands (OpenSource software development agents) - 2024
Benchmarks:
SWE-Bench (Real world software development) - 2023
Chatbot Arena (Live human preference Elo ratings) - 2024
Videos/Lectures:
3Blue1Brown on Foundational Math/Concepts
Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch) #1 Bestseller
Andrej Kaparthy: Zero to Hero Series
Yannic Kilcher Paper Explanations
Noam Brown (o1 founder) on Planning in AI
Stanford: Building LLMs
Why You’re Not Too Old to Pivot Into AI (motivation)
Helpful Websites:
History of Deep Learning - summary timeline of deeplearning with major breakthroughs and key concepts
Full Stack Deep Learning - courses for building AI products
Prompting Guide - extensive list of prompting techniques and examples
a16z AI Cannon - similar list of resources, but longer (slightly dated)
2025 AI Engineer Reading List - longer reading list, broken out by focus area
State of Generative Models 2024 - good simple summary of current state
Others (non LLMs):
Vision Transformer (no need for CNNs) - 2021
Latent Diffusion (Text-to-Image) - 2021
Obvious/easy papers (to get your feet wet if you're new to papers):
CoT (Chain of Thought) - 2022
SELF-REFINE: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback - 2023
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Additional Resources and Links
Blogs
The 70% Problem:Hard truths about AI Assisted Coding
Thoughts On A Month with Devin
The Illustrated Transformer
Visualizing A Neural Machine Translation Model (Mechanics of Seq2seq Models With Attention)
Cloudflare - what is artificial intelligence
Open Source Tools
Letta - framework for creating LLMs with Memory
Kubeflow - machine learning for kubernetes
Milvus - high performance vector database built for scale
Faiss - efficient similarity search for dense vectors
Weaviate - AI native database for new generation of software
OpenLLMetryOpen source observibility for your LLM application, based on OpenTelemetry