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🎓 What is this course about?

📌 Quick start

Get hands-on with LLM APIs and self-hosted models as you code, experiment, and build your own platform for custom AI-powered NPCs.

This 12-week course, created by experts from academia and industry, is designed specifically for developers and engineers. You’ll have a chance to get guidance from experienced pros, join regular Q&A sessions to stay on track, and connect with peers along the way.

Materials for each topic can be found in the ./topic* folders. See README.md for further details and instructions.

Any technical issues, ideas, bugs in course materials, contribution ideas - add an issue.

📖 Course roadmap

Study advanced concepts and apply your new knowledge right away.

Join live sessions to connect with peers and course experts, reinforcing your learning.

Topic 1️⃣ LLM API Basics

Basics of LLM and Multimodal LLM API usage and prompt strategies, typical problems arising with LLMs, creativity-vs-reproducibility control.

Project: Creating a chatbot and deploying it in a cloud.

Topic 2️⃣ LLM Workflows

LLM Workflows and beyond: from Chaining to AI Agents. LLM Reasoning.

Project: Planning and memory summarization; Automating evaluation.

Topic 3️⃣ Context

RAG and its technicalities; vector stores, databases in production. RAG evaluation.

Project: Adding RAG to the NPC Factory service.

Topic 4️⃣ Self-Deployed LLMs

Working with open source LLMs and practical LLM inference in production. Computational and memory bottlenecks of LLM inference.

Project: Deploying a chat service based on a self-served LLM. Serving text encoders and rerankers. Making a cost-to-value choice between API and self-served LLMs.

Topic 5️⃣ Optimization and Monitoring

Optimizing LLM inference, quantization and beyond. Production monitoring and observability.

Project: Optimizing open source LLM inference. Establishing monitoring with Evidently AI, Prometeus and Grafana.

Topic 6️⃣ Fine-Tuning

Fine-tuning of LLMs and embeddings. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning and LoRA. RLHF and DPO

Project: Making your characters even more alive through fine-tuning

🏗️ NPC Factory Project

During the course, you'll build a platform that serves intelligent, believable, reactive, and autonomous NPCs — non-player characters at the heart of immersive games, driving engaging interactions and making worlds feel rich and dynamic.

• Deploy models on real servers and integrate them into game environments.
• Implement agentic capabilities, enabling NPCs to set goals and adapt dynamically.
• Build scalable APIs to support complex game interactions.
• Optimize performance, monitor behavior, and fine-tune models for smooth, responsive gameplay.

💬 Join the community

Connect with experts, engage in discussions, ask questions, and share insights, experiences, and feedback with fellow learners on Discord. Stay in the loop — live session announcements will be posted there, too!

For updates, you can also subscribe to our newsletter.

👨‍🏫 Meet our team

Led by AI expert Stanislav Fedotov, this course was created by a team of AI practitioners dedicated to making AI education accessible and keeping professionals ahead in the field:

Alexey Bukhtiyarov

Nikita Pavlichenko

Sergei Petrov

Sergei Skvortsov

Alex Umnov