How to become GOD-LEVEL with Large Language Models.
Here are 50 hands-on projects with solutions that will teach you how Large Language Models work.
You don't need to solve all 50, but if you do, you'll be at the top 0.01% of the field.
It's all Python + Pytorch + SciKit-Learn + Pandas + Numpy + Matplotlib + Seaborn.
Here are the 50 problems from the book (link below):
Tokenization
1. Three tokenization schemes
2. Book lengths in characters, words, and tokens
3. Pandas frequency tables of token lengths
4. Token lengths in characters and bytes
5. Is tokenization compression?
6. Tokenization and compression in different languages
7. Translating between tokenizers
Embeddings
8. Distribution of cosine similarities
9. Sequential cosine similarity
10. Sequential number cosine similarity
11. Network graphs of cosine similarities
12. RSA to compare GPT-2 & BERT embeddings
13. Word similarity via distance and cosine
14. Linear semantic axes
15. Analogy vectors
Output logits
16. Softmax probability distributions
17. Probabilistic token selection
18. Token prediction accuracy
19. LLM loss function
20. Perplexity over sequences, texts, and models
21. Predict token position with linear and logistic regressions
22. Evaluating models with HellaSwag
23. Measuring language biases
Transformer outputs
24. Cosine similarities within and across layers
25. Category selectivity via cosine similarity
26. Current layer = previous layer + adjustments
27. Impact of layer-specific noise and scaling
28. Effective dimensionality of hidden layers
29. Hidden state dimensionality reduction
30. Sentiment analysis with decision trees
31. Logit lens
32. Patching hidden states in indirect object identification
Attention
33. QKV weights characteristics
34. QKV activation characteristics
35. Raw and softmax attention scores
36. Characteristics of attention adjustment magnitudes
37. Token prediction and attention KL divergences
38. Laminar profile of RSA and category selectivity
39. Token frequency, attention adjustments, QK^T
40. Downstream impacts of head silencing
41. Patching heads in IOI
MLP
42. MLP weights and activations characteristics
43. Characterizing the MLP progression
44. Grammar tuning in MLP projections
45. Minkowski distance, mutual information, and token positions
46. Statistics-based lesioning in MLP neurons
47. Supervised probing with XGBoost
48. "Can" vs. "can't" classification via logistic regression
49. Successive median-replacement of MLP activations
50. Recommender systems with MLP projections
Book link below.
I put all my RL creatures into the same scene.
Feels like there is some kind of interesting game design here. Tending to / training your RL menagerie.
Made with @threejs@webgl_webgpu MuJoCo from @GoogleDeepMind trained on @runpod
Using Fable 5 to add fur and a new voice to my RL creature. The voice is based on the neural network activation (pictured top left). Made with @threejs@webgl_webgpu@runpod trained with JAX and MuJoCo from @GoogleDeepMind
Recently people have caught on to the fact that some of the people taking home millions every year working at an AI lab aren’t actually working on the core pretraining team, or even touching the model weights. They’re just an engineer! They don’t even do math!
Instead they’re building the infrastructure to serve the models to hundreds of millions of people.
Try running an open model with vLLM or SGLang on k8s. Hard enough on its own.
Then add load balancing, autoscaling, logs and metrics. Then add performance optimizations: pd disagg, MTP, KV aware routing, KV offload, etc. And now make the load balancing global across a fleet of datacenters with diverse hardware (even just a few different generations of NVIDIA GPUs)
The result is an unbelievably complicated system that only a few people can keep in their head and reason about.
But when they do, and they find a 1% performance improvement that touches millions of users and billions of $ worth of hardware, it certainly pays for itself
PPO had a second wave in the LLM era for reasons unanticipated by the original paper
- the importance-ratio objective fixes biases from numeric error, async training, and forward pass noise
- the clipping objective affects entropy through a mechanism that we didn't know about at the time of publication (DAPO, https://t.co/sBo9DeFS5Y)
Joining @openai next month!
after seeing people's reaction to Alisa's post about her experience, I also wrote down some of the surprising things I wish I know before my research scientist job search: https://t.co/vyFV6lYpWD
we have had high school dropouts in SF doing research in areas like post training / reasoning / RL
you can as well, this is indeed one of the most help blog to land in a frontier lab
top learning resources:
LeetCode 75 / Neetcode Blind 75
Stanford CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch
Self-Attention & Transformers
The Illustrated GPT-2
Backpropagation
Introduction to Policy Gradient for LMs
Lightweight Guide to understanding GRPO and RL principles
How to Scale Your Model
I'm joining OpenAI next week!🥹 The job search turned out to be really challenging but also super rewarding, so I wrote a small blog to share what I learned along the way and hopefully make the process a little less mysterious for the next person. https://t.co/6FigSBdenD
Great paper on long-term memory for LLM agents.
(bookmark it)
Coarse summaries drift and unconstrained updates corrupt, so AtomMem makes the unit of memory small.
A Fact Executor pulls high-value atomic facts out of long interactions, organizes them into hierarchical event structures and temporal user profiles, then activates an associative memory graph at retrieval time to connect fragmented pieces.
It reports state-of-the-art on the LoCoMo multi-session benchmark while staying cheap enough to deploy.
Paper: https://t.co/F73NhNdcMR
Learn to build effective AI agents in our academy: https://t.co/LRnpZN7L4c
Avg job description for AI/ML Engineers in 2026
- Python programming, SQL, NoSQL
- ML, Sklearn, computer vision, NLP, Transformers, PyTorch
- FastAPI, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Cloud deployment
- FAST PACED capabilities
- Gen AI libraries and LLMs
- Problem solving, ETL, Data Engineering
Simply means you've to level up in your skills so fast and learn complete AI/ML lifecycle with deployment and not just a toy project. There's no alternate to this.
And yes you need to learn all these things at once even while they will ask DSA or distribution systems in an interview.
Which means,
Prepare
DSA (Medium) + ML algorithms + Deep Learning + Gen AI + LLMs + MLOps + Cloud + ML system design + Distributed systems
There's a no shortcut and that's the truth!!!