AI Key Concepts & Terms - The Missing Guide
Understand the language of AI—and see how the pieces fit together.
About This Course
Welcome to "AI Key Concepts & Terms - The Missing Guide"!
LLMs, AI agents, tokens, RAG, MCP, context engineering—these terms appear everywhere. But what do they actually mean, why do they matter, and how do they connect?
This course gives you the foundation to make sense of modern artificial intelligence. Move beyond recognizing buzzwords and build a clear understanding of the models, tools, and systems behind today's AI applications.
Join Maximilian Schwarzmüller and learn through straightforward explanations, diagrams, and concrete examples. Whether you are new to AI or already use tools like ChatGPT and Claude, you will see how the key concepts fit together.
Follow the full course to build a connected foundation, or return to individual lessons whenever you encounter an unfamiliar term.
Why Learn These AI Concepts?
A clear mental model helps you follow AI discussions, understand the tools you use, communicate with technical teams, and prepare for more specialized AI learning.
What's in This Course?
You’ll connect the essential ideas behind models, responses, training, agents, knowledge systems, evaluation, and AI risks.
Understand Models & Training
See how AI, machine learning, and language models connect. Learn what training, fine-tuning, and distillation do, and why model size and efficiency matter.
Connect Context & Knowledge
Explore tokens, prompts, context windows, and memory. Connect RAG, embeddings, and vector databases to understand how models use information and why their answers vary.
Learn How AI Agents Work
Follow the agent loop and see how models use tools to get work done. Understand harnesses, MCP, agent skills, computer use, and the role of human oversight.
Evaluate AI & Recognize Risks
Look beyond benchmark scores and understand evals. Recognize hallucinations, prompt injection, and data exposure risks, and explore open model weights and running models locally.
In Detail, You'll Learn
The course begins with AI foundations, then connects language models and context with training, agents, knowledge, evaluation, risks, and model choices.
Models, Training & Context
Build a clear foundation for understanding modern AI:
- AI, machine learning, neural networks, and language models
- LLMs, smaller models, and multimodal models
- Tokens, context windows, and temperature
- Prompt engineering and context engineering
- Training, inference, fine-tuning, LoRA, and RLHF
- Distillation, caching, quantization, and model routing
Agents, Knowledge & Reliability
Understand how AI systems act, retrieve information, and fail:
- Agent loops, tools, harnesses, and agent skills
- MCP, computer use, and human oversight
- Grounding, RAG, embeddings, and vector databases
- Memory, compaction, and context rot
- Evals, benchmarks, and hallucinations
- Prompt injection, data exfiltration, and open model weights
A Clear Starting Point and a Useful Reference
Most lessons take only a few minutes. Learn the concepts in sequence or revisit a focused lesson whenever an unfamiliar AI term appears.
Built for AI Beginners, AI Tool Users & Technical Professionals
See The Course In Action
Example Curriculum
- Welcome to the Course (1:03)
- Download the Complete Course Slide Deck
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) (2:24)
- Machine Learning (ML) (2:22)
- Neural Networks & Deep Learning (2:24)
- Large Language Models (LLMs) (3:10)
- Small Language Models (SLMs) (2:24)
- Vision Language Models (VLMs) (1:27)
- Multimodality (1:31)
- Frontier Models (0:49)
- Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) (1:33)
- Training vs. Inference (1:50)
- Pre-Training vs. Post-Training (2:07)
- Fine-Tuning (1:41)
- LoRA & Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (1:38)
- Synthetic Data (2:17)
- Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) (2:28)
- Distillation (1:51)
- Data Poisoning (1:51)
- Reasoning Models (0:49)
- Caching (1:13)
- Quantization (1:59)
- Model Routing (2:35)
Course Prerequisites
Here's what you need to get the most out of this course
- Curiosity about modern AI concepts and terminology.
- A device on which you can watch the course lessons.
- No prior AI knowledge is required.
- No programming experience or advanced mathematics is required.
- No paid AI subscription, API key, or software installation is required.
Start from scratch and build a clear, connected understanding of modern artificial intelligence.
Your Instructor
Maximilian Schwarzmüller
Founder & Instructor
Self-taught developer with 3,500,000+ students and 900,000 YouTube subscribers. I co-founded Academind with Manuel Lorenz to help people master new skills and build amazing projects.
Join 792 happy students!
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Full access to "AI Key Concepts & Terms - The Missing Guide"
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Unlimited access to this and all other current & future courses!
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