🎓 Recommended AI Courses & Learning Paths

A curated list of reliable, trusted, and up-to-date online courses for AI engineers, ML practitioners, and product teams. Every course here is verified as of May 2026, no fluff, no outdated MOOCs.

Note on code staleness: these courses are curated for their concepts. The framework APIs they use (LlamaIndex, LangChain) churn fast, so notebook code in any recorded course drifts out of date and can fail on a fresh install. Before copy-pasting, run the 30-second currency check in Navigating Framework Churn, and learn the primitives, not the import paths.

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Table of Contents

• Foundation: LLMs & Transformers
• RAG Pipelines
• Agentic AI & Multi-Agent Systems
• Context & Memory Management
• AI Evaluations & Observability
• Prompt Engineering & Context Engineering
• Fine-tuning & Adaptation
• Inference Optimization & MLOps
• AI Safety & Guardrails
• Coding Agents & Developer AI Tools
• For PMs & Non-Engineers
• YouTube Channels & Free Content
• Learning Path Suggestions

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Foundation: LLMs & Transformers

Course	Provider	Cost	Why It's Trusted
Neural Networks: Zero to Hero	Andrej Karpathy (YouTube)	Free	The definitive from-scratch series by an OpenAI/Tesla legend. Builds GPT from scratch.
CS324: Large Language Models	Stanford	Free	Stanford-quality lecture notes covering LLM fundamentals, scaling laws, alignment.
Generative AI with LLMs	DeepLearning.AI + AWS (Coursera)	~$50	Hands-on intro to LLMs, covering training, fine-tuning, RLHF. By Andrew Ng's team.
Practical Deep Learning for Coders	fast.ai	Free	Bottom-up, code-first approach. Best for engineers who learn by doing.

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RAG Pipelines

Course	Provider	Cost	Why It's Trusted
Building and Evaluating Advanced RAG	DeepLearning.AI + LlamaIndex	Free	Covers sentence-window retrieval, auto-merging, RAG evaluation with TruLens.
Vector Databases: from Embeddings to Applications	DeepLearning.AI + Weaviate	Free	Practical walkthrough of embeddings, vector stores, and hybrid search.
Building RAG Agents with LLMs	NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute	Free	Enterprise-grade RAG with NVIDIA NIM. Covers chunking, reranking, evaluation.
LlamaIndex — Documentation: Learning	LlamaIndex	Free	Official LlamaIndex learning path — best for deep RAG pipeline mastery.
RAG Fundamentals (Haystack)	deepset / Haystack	Free	Hands-on tutorials for pipeline-based RAG using the Haystack framework.

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Agentic AI & Multi-Agent Systems

Course	Provider	Cost	Why It's Trusted
AI Agents in LangGraph	DeepLearning.AI + LangChain	Free	LangGraph by the creators. Covers ReAct, persistence, human-in-the-loop, multi-agent.
Multi AI Agent Systems with crewAI	DeepLearning.AI + crewAI	Free	Official CrewAI course. Covers Crews, Flows, and real-world business automations.
Building Agentic RAG with LlamaIndex	DeepLearning.AI + LlamaIndex	Free	Routing, tool-calling agents, and multi-document agentic retrieval.
Functions, Tools and Agents with LangChain	DeepLearning.AI + LangChain	Free	Tool-calling, OpenAI function calling, building from scratch.
Developing AI Agents using AutoGen	DeepLearning.AI + Microsoft	Free	AutoGen multi-agent patterns. Covers debate, tool-use, and code execution agents.
CS294/194-196: LLM Agents (Berkeley)	UC Berkeley	Free	Graduate-level course on LLM agents. Covers memory, planning, safety, evaluation.

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Context & Memory Management

Course	Provider	Cost	Why It's Trusted
Building Systems with the ChatGPT API	DeepLearning.AI + OpenAI	Free	Covers multi-turn conversation state, context management, moderation chains.
Prompt Engineering with Llama 2	DeepLearning.AI + Meta	Free	Shows context window tradeoffs and system prompt management with Llama 2.
Reasoning with o1	DeepLearning.AI + OpenAI	Free	Deep dive into o1 reasoning, budget tokens, thinking modes. Directly applicable to o3 and Claude 3.7 Extended Thinking.
Mem0 Documentation	Mem0 (official)	Free	Definitive reference for multi-tier memory in production agents.

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AI Evaluations & Observability

Course	Provider	Cost	Why It's Trusted
Evals for AI: Maven Course	Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar (Maven)	Paid (~$400)	Industry gold standard for AI evals. Used in production at dozens of companies. Our repo's evals guides are based on this course.
Evaluating and Debugging Generative AI	DeepLearning.AI + W&B	Free	Covers tracing, evaluation with W&B Weave, and experiment tracking.
Quality and Safety for LLM Applications	DeepLearning.AI + WhyLabs	Free	Covers hallucination detection, toxicity, bias evaluation, and drift monitoring.
LangSmith Evaluation Tutorials	LangChain	Free	Official LangSmith docs are the best hands-on eval reference if you use the LangChain ecosystem.
Phoenix + Langfuse official docs	Arize Phoenix	Free	Hands-on tutorials for open-source evals using Phoenix.

📖 Also see this repo's companion guides: - AI Evals: Comprehensive Study Guide (Phoenix + Langfuse) - AI Evals: LangWatch + Langfuse Guide

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Prompt Engineering & Context Engineering

Course	Provider	Cost	Why It's Trusted
ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers	DeepLearning.AI + OpenAI	Free	The foundational prompt engineering course. By Isa Fulford & Andrew Ng.
Prompting Fundamentals (Anthropic)	Anthropic	Free	Straight from the Claude team. Covers prompt design, XML tags, chain-of-thought.
DSPy: Building Optimizable Pipelines	Stanford NLP (GitHub)	Free	Not a course but the DSPy repo's notebooks are the best way to learn programmatic prompting.
Prompt Engineering Guide	DAIR.AI	Free	Comprehensive, community-maintained reference covering all major prompting techniques.

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Fine-tuning & Adaptation

Course	Provider	Cost	Why It's Trusted
Finetuning Large Language Models	DeepLearning.AI + Lamini	Free	Covers LoRA, full fine-tuning, dataset preparation, evaluation. Concise and practical.
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback	DeepLearning.AI + AWS	Free	Deep dive into RLHF: reward models, PPO, preference datasets.
Hugging Face NLP Course	Hugging Face	Free	The best free course for fine-tuning transformers with the HF ecosystem (Trainer, PEFT, etc).
How Diffusion Models Work	DeepLearning.AI	Free	For image model fine-tuning (stable diffusion, LoRA for images).

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Inference Optimization & MLOps

Course	Provider	Cost	Why It's Trusted
ML Engineering for Production (MLOps)	DeepLearning.AI (Coursera)	Paid	4-course specialization on production ML: deployment, monitoring, pipelines.
Efficiently Serving LLMs	DeepLearning.AI + Predibase	Free	Covers vLLM, PagedAttention, quantization, LoRA serving. Exactly what this guide covers.
vLLM Documentation & Tutorial	vLLM	Free	The official vLLM docs are the most up-to-date reference for high-throughput serving.

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AI Safety & Guardrails

Course	Provider	Cost	Why It's Trusted
Red Teaming LLM Applications	DeepLearning.AI + Giskard	Free	Hands-on red teaming, prompt injection, jailbreak detection, bias testing.
AI Safety Fundamentals	BlueDot Impact	Free	Most trusted free course on AI alignment and safety. Used by professionals at Anthropic, DeepMind.
NVIDIA AI Red Team (NEMO Guardrails)	NVIDIA	Free	Hands-on notebooks for building production guardrails with NeMo Guardrails.

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Coding Agents & Developer AI Tools

Course	Provider	Cost	Why It's Trusted
Claude Code — Official Docs	Anthropic	Free	The definitive starting point for Claude Code. Covers CLAUDE.md, SDK, and permissions.
Building Code Agents (Hugging Face)	Hugging Face	Free	HuggingFace's official agents course — includes a unit on building code-execution agents.
Introduction to OpenHands	All-Hands AI	Free	Official getting-started guide for OpenHands autonomous coding agent.

📖 Also see this repo's guides: Claude Code Guide and OpenCoder Landscape

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For PMs & Non-Engineers

These require no Python experience:

Course	Provider	Cost	Why It's Good
AI for Everyone	DeepLearning.AI (Coursera)	Free	Andrew Ng's course for non-technical roles. Covers what AI can/can't do, project leadership.
Prompt Engineering for Everyone	Learn Prompting	Free	Plain-English guide to prompt engineering for non-engineers.
Evals for AI (Maven)	Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar	Paid	Despite having code, this course is designed for PMs and QAs, not just engineers. Highly recommended.
AI Product Management	Product School	Free (blog)	Practical guide for PMs building AI-powered products.
Google: Introduction to Generative AI	Google Cloud Skills Boost	Free	No-code introduction to generative AI, LLMs, and responsible AI.

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YouTube Channels & Free Content

Channel / Resource	Focus	Why Follow
Andrej Karpathy	Foundations, transformers	Best explanations of how LLMs actually work
Yannic Kilcher	Paper reviews	Clear walkthroughs of latest ML research papers
Aleksa Gordić - The AI Epiphany	Paper reviews	Deep technical paper breakdowns
AI Jason	Agents, LangChain, practical	Great intro videos for agentic frameworks
Sam Witteveen	Gemini, RAG, agents	One of the best practical AI YouTubers
Matt Wolfe	AI news, product demos	Best for staying current on AI news and tools
Hamel Husain (blog)	Evals, production AI, LLMs	Real production insights from the author of the evals maven course
Simon Willison (blog)	LLM news, tools, coding	The most trustworthy daily AI news source
The Latent Space podcast	Technical AI interviews	Best technical AI podcast — deep dives with researchers
Lex Fridman Podcast	Broad AI/ML interviews	Long-form interviews with leading AI researchers

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Learning Path Suggestions

🛤️ Path: "I'm new to AI and want to build things fast"

Week 1: Prompt Engineering for Developers (DeepLearning.AI) — free, 2 hrs
Week 2: Building Systems with ChatGPT API (DeepLearning.AI) — free, 2 hrs
Week 3: Building and Evaluating Advanced RAG (DeepLearning.AI) — free, 2 hrs
Week 4: AI Agents in LangGraph (DeepLearning.AI) — free, 4 hrs
Month 2: Pick a real project, use this guide as reference

🛤️ Path: "I want to understand LLMs deeply"

Week 1-3: Neural Networks: Zero to Hero (Karpathy) — free, 12+ hrs
Week 4-6: CS324 Stanford LLMs — free, 30+ hrs
Month 2: Generative AI with LLMs (Coursera DeepLearning.AI)
Month 3: CS294 LLM Agents (Berkeley)

🛤️ Path: "I want to build production-ready AI evaluation"

Week 1: Evaluating and Debugging Generative AI (DeepLearning.AI + W&B) — free
Week 2: This repo's evals guides (Phoenix/Langfuse) — free  ← start here
Week 3-4: Quality and Safety for LLM Applications (DeepLearning.AI)
Month 2: Evals for AI (Maven, Hamel + Shreya) — paid, worth it

🛤️ Path: "I'm a PM learning to contribute to AI product quality"

Week 1: AI for Everyone (Coursera) — free
Week 2: Prompt Engineering for Everyone (learnprompting.org) — free
Week 3: AI Evals guide in this repo — free (especially Chapters 1-3 on error analysis)
Month 2: Evals for AI (Maven) — paid, has PM track

🛤️ Path: "I want to deploy coding agents in my team"

Day 1: Claude Code docs (anthropic.com) — free
Week 1: This repo's Claude Code Guide + OpenCoder Landscape Guide
Week 2: Building Code Agents (Hugging Face) — free
Month 1: Run Claude Code on a real project in CI

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How to Stay Current

AI moves fast. Beyond courses, these habits keep you current:

1. Follow Simon Willison's blog — daily, trustworthy AI news summaries
2. Read Anthropic + OpenAI release notes — primary sources beat second-hand summaries
3. Watch the Latent Space podcast — best technical depth
4. Contribute to open source — OpenHands, LlamaIndex, DSPy — real learning happens in PRs
5. Star this repo — we update it as the landscape changes ⭐

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Maintained by Om Bharatiya. PRs welcome for new course additions!