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Best resources to learnLarge Language Models

Study sheet

Explore the world of large-scale language models like GPT, BERT, and their variants. Learn about pre-training, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and deploying LLMs for various applications.

Where to start

Start with Andrej Karpathy's free hour-long talk Intro to Large Language Models, which explains pretraining, fine-tuning into an assistant and security issues such as prompt injection. If you only use one resource, make it Sebastian Raschka's Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch), a Manning book that codes a GPT-style model in PyTorch step by step. For fine-tuning, quantisation, RAG and deployment, continue with Maxime Labonne's LLM Course on GitHub.

18 resources · · How we curate

📺YouTube(2)

youtube

Stanford CS229 I Machine Learning I Building Large Language Models (LLMs)

A Stanford CS229 lecture surveying the full LLM pipeline: tokenization, transformer architecture, training data and scaling laws, evaluation, and post-training alignment. It explains the engineering decisions and costs behind a production model.

intermediate🇬🇧
youtube

[1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models

Andrej Karpathy's hour-long talk explaining LLMs as a compressed model of internet text, covering pretraining, finetuning into an assistant, and emerging capabilities plus security issues like jailbreaks and prompt injection.

intermediate🇬🇧

🎓Courses(3)

course

CS224N: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning

Learn cutting-edge Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning in Stanford's CS224N course by Christopher Manning.

advanced🇬🇧
course

ARENA: Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator Curriculum

Five chapters of PyTorch exercises with solutions: deep learning foundations, transformer interpretability with TransformerLens, reinforcement learning, LLM evaluations and alignment science. Working through them leaves you able to replicate interpretability papers and build evaluation harnesses yourself.

advanced🇬🇧
course

Hugging Face NLP Course

A free, online course by Hugging Face, a leading company in NLP tools and models. It covers transformers, fine-tuning, and using the Hugging Face ecosystem, which is crucial for practical LLM work.

beginner🇬🇧

📚Books(2)

bookPaid

Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)

Sebastian Raschka's Manning book walks through coding a GPT-style model in PyTorch step by step: tokenization, attention, the transformer block, pretraining on unlabeled text, then fine-tuning for classification and instruction following.

intermediate🇬🇧
book

Speech and Language Processing

Free draft third edition of the standard NLP textbook, covering n-gram and neural language models, word embeddings, transformers, sequence labeling, parsing, machine translation and speech recognition. Readers gain the theory needed to build and evaluate modern language-processing systems.

intermediate🇬🇧

🌐Websites(7)

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website

Deep (Learning) Focus

Cameron R. Wolfe's newsletter, which takes one deep learning research topic at a time and walks through several papers on it in sequence, supplying the background needed to read the primary literature yourself.

intermediate🇬🇧
website

LLM Course

Maxime Labonne's open GitHub curriculum covers three tracks: LLM fundamentals, building models, and deploying them, with Colab notebooks on fine-tuning, quantization, RAG, and evaluation. Learners finish able to train and ship their own models.

intermediate🇬🇧
website

Awesome Generative AI Guide

Aggregates generative AI learning paths, free courses such as an agentic AI crash course and applied LLM series, interview question banks, code notebooks, and monthly research paper roundups into one continuously updated GitHub hub.

intermediate🇬🇧
website

Hands-On Large Language Models

Visual, code-first material from Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst covering tokenization, embeddings, semantic search, text classification, clustering, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning, aimed at practitioners who want intuition alongside working implementations.

intermediate🇬🇧
website

Prompt Engineering Guide

Reference covering prompting techniques with worked examples: zero-shot and few-shot, chain-of-thought, self-consistency, ReAct, and tree of thoughts, plus model-specific notes and adversarial prompting risks. Readers finish able to choose techniques deliberately.

intermediate🇬🇧
website👁️ 19

The Illustrated Transformer by Jay Alammar

A brilliant visual explanation of the Transformer architecture, making complex concepts much easier to grasp. This is often cited as a first step for many learners.

beginner🇬🇧
website

GenAI Handbook: A Roadmap for Learning Resources

A comprehensive open-source handbook acting as a roadmap for understanding the core concepts of modern artificial intelligence systems, with a strong focus on Generative AI.

intermediate🇬🇧

📄Papers(3)

paper

Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models

Shows that prompting a large model with a few worked examples containing intermediate reasoning steps substantially improves arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning, and that the effect emerges only at sufficient model scale. The origin of chain-of-thought prompting.

intermediate🇬🇧
paper

"BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding" (Devlin et al., 2018)

Introduced BERT, a breakthrough in pre-training language representations using a Transformer encoder, significantly impacting the development of LLMs.

advanced🇬🇧
paper

"Attention Is All You Need" (Vaswani et al., 2017)

The seminal paper that introduced the Transformer architecture, which is the foundation of almost all modern Large Language Models (LLMs). Essential reading for anyone serious about understanding LLMs.

advanced🇬🇧

🎙️Podcasts(1)

podcast

The TWIML AI Podcast

Long-running interview podcast hosted by Sam Charrington in which ML and AI researchers and practitioners discuss their work on deep learning, natural language processing, neural networks and data science, helping listeners follow current research and how it is applied in industry.

intermediate🌐
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Frequently Asked Questions

Where should I start learning Large Language Models?

Start with Andrej Karpathy's free hour-long talk Intro to Large Language Models, which explains pretraining, fine-tuning into an assistant and security issues such as prompt injection. If you only use one resource, make it Sebastian Raschka's Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch), a Manning book that codes a GPT-style model in PyTorch step by step. For fine-tuning, quantisation, RAG and deployment, continue with Maxime Labonne's LLM Course on GitHub.

What are the best free resources to learn Large Language Models?

Dantes has curated 18 resources for Large Language Models, including 2 YouTube videos, 2 books, 3 courses, 7 websites, 3 papers, 1 podcasts. All resources are hand-picked for quality — no algorithmic filler. Browse the full list above to find the format that works best for you.

Is Large Language Models hard to learn?

The resources curated here cover intermediate and advanced level material. The best approach is to start with whichever format suits your learning style — video, book, or structured course.

What types of Large Language Models learning resources are available on Dantes?

For Large Language Models, Dantes has curated 2 YouTube videos, 2 books, 3 courses, 7 websites, 3 papers, 1 podcasts. Each resource type serves a different learning style: videos and YouTube for visual learners, books for depth, courses for structured progression, and websites for quick reference.

How does Dantes select Large Language Models resources?

Dantes is an algorithm-free learning directory. Resources are hand-curated based on quality, accuracy, and usefulness — not engagement metrics or paid placements. The goal is to surface the best learning material for Large Language Models, whether it's a free YouTube series, a classic textbook, or an open courseware from a top university.

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