Stanford Opens Free CS336 Course: 18 Lectures on Building LLMs from Scratch
mdancho84 · x · 2026-10-19
Matt Dancho recommends Stanford's CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch (Spring 2026), arguing that data scientists should move beyond ML certifications and learn to engineer AI systems — not just call APIs.
The free 18-lecture course covers the full engineering stack behind modern LLMs:
- Architecture: tokenization, Transformers, MoE
- Hardware: GPUs, TPUs, memory, FLOPs
- Performance: Triton, FlashAttention, parallelism
- Training: scaling laws, data pipelines, distributed training
- Deployment: inference and evaluation
- Post-training: SFT, RLHF, reinforcement learning
A solid free path for engineers aiming to go from API caller to AI architect.
Related event: Stanford Releases Free CS336 Course on Building LLMs from Scratch(2 posts)→
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