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ModelTerms

Learning paths

Walk the concepts, in order.

Eight curated paths through the 83 most-important AI and LLM concepts. Each path explains why every step matters and links to the full term entry.

18 min · beginner · 7 terms

From zero to LLM

The seven concepts that turn "AI" into a real mental model.

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22 min · intermediate · 7 terms

The attention family

Self-attention to FlashAttention — how the transformer's core operation evolved.

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24 min · intermediate · 9 terms

The post-training pipeline

Pretraining gives you a base model. This is how it becomes ChatGPT.

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30 min · intermediate · 13 terms

The RAG stack

From "let the model answer from documents" to a production retrieval system.

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28 min · intermediate · 13 terms

How modern teams actually evaluate LLMs

Past benchmarks: pairwise comparison, win rates, LLM-as-judge, online and offline.

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26 min · intermediate · 12 terms

The agent loop

Tool use, ReAct, plan-and-execute, MCP — how LLMs do work instead of just talking.

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26 min · advanced · 12 terms

Inference engineering

Make models fast and cheap to serve. The metrics, the techniques, the trade-offs.

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22 min · intermediate · 10 terms

LLMOps & observability

Tracing every call, watching drift, feeding back into evals. Production AI discipline.

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How learning paths work

Each path is a hand-ordered sequence of glossary terms picked to build the right mental model. Read each entry top-to-bottom; click through to the full term page for the deep dive; come back to the path to continue. No accounts, no progress tracking — just a curated reading list.

Prefer free-range learning? The A–Z index lists every term alphabetically. Want to test yourself? Try the quiz.