The best LLM book to date?!

A 470-page guide covering everything about LLMs

Good morning everyone! Today, I am glad to share about a very special project we've been working on at Towards AI for the past 1.5 years along a dozen graduates and experts in the field... our new and first book: Building LLMs for Production!

One of the reasons I quit my PhD in AI was to build practical solutions that will help others in the real world and improve what exists. While I love the world of academia, when I first stepped into the startup world, it felt like I pretty much knew nothing all over again. I needed to understand the problems in the real-world application of AI and build solutions for it. Not just research but real models, real products, and real people using them. But here's the thing: grasping these challenges is merely the first step. For the ‘how’ part of it, you need to get into the code, the architecture, the models, the APIs, the deployments, the trials and errors, and the complex and wide varieties of frameworks - you don't have time to reinvent the wheel in a startup! So we've gathered everything we worked on and with in this 470-page book all about LLMs and how to work with them. Right now, this means working with LlamaIndex, LangChain, Activeloop and other of such amazing tools, but we believe the book still teaches concepts that will stay relevant for a long time even as LLMs get better, such as reducing hallucinations, teaching how to work and use them, some cool theory and tips and more.

Of course, I made a video giving more details about the book if you are curious:

p.s. The only skill required for the book is some Python (or programming) knowledge.

"Building LLMs for Production: Enhancing LLM Abilities and Reliability with Prompting, Fine-Tuning, and RAG" is now available on Amazon! We are also on Goodreads with the same name. If you want to support us for free, give a review there.

Get the book now and let us know what you think: https://amzn.to/4bqYU9b

Here are a few of the many testimonials we've got to give you a better idea of what this book is about:

"This is the most comprehensive textbook to date on building LLM applications, and helps learners understand everything from fundamentals to the simple-to-advanced building blocks of constructing LLM applications. The application topics include prompting, RAG, agents, fine-tuning, and deployment - all essential topics in an AI Engineer's toolkit."

• Jerry Liu , Co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex

“An indispensable guide for anyone venturing into the world of large language models. This book masterfully demystifies complex concepts, making them accessible and actionable. Covering everything from theory to practical deployment, it’s a must-have in the library of every aspiring and seasoned AI professional.”

• Shashank Kalanithi , Data Engineer at Meta

“"Building LLMs in Production" is for you. It contains thorough explanations and code for you to start using and deploying LLMs, as well as optimizing their performance. Very highly recommended!”

• Luis Serrano, PhD, Founder of Serrano.Academy and author of Grokking Machine Learning

“This book covers everything you need to know to start applying LLMs in a pragmatic way - it balances the right amount of theory and applied knowledge, providing intuitions, use-cases and code snippets. It covers the foundational aspects of LLMs as well as advanced use-cases like finetuning LLMs, Retrieval Augmented Generation and Agents. This will be valuable to anyone looking to dive into the field quickly and efficiently.”

• Jeremy Pinto , Senior Applied Research Scientist at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute

"A truly wonderful resource that develops understanding of LLMs from the ground up, from theory to code and modern frameworks. Grounds your knowledge in research trends and frameworks that develop your intuition around what's coming. Highly recommend."

• Pete Huang , Co-founder of The Neuron

“If you desire to embark on a journey to use Large Language Models in production systems but are worried you might not have the adequate background, worry not! This book will guide you through the evolution of these models from simple Transformers to more advanced RAG-assisted LLMs capable of producing verifiable responses. The book is accessible, with multiple tutorials that you can readily copy, paste and run on your local machine to showcase the magic of modern AI.”

• Rafid Al-Humaimidi , Senior Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS)

“As someone obsessed with proper terminology in Prompt Engineering and Generative AI, I am impressed by the robustness of this book. Towards AI has done a great job assembling all of the technical resources needed by a modern GenAI applied practitioner.”

• Sander Schulhoff , Founder and CEO of Learn Prompting

And that's it for this iteration! I'm incredibly grateful that the What's AI newsletter is now read by over 16,000 incredible human beings. Click here to share this iteration with a friend if you learned something new!

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Thank you for reading, and I wish you a fantastic week! Be sure to have enough sleep and physical activities next week!

Louis-François Bouchard