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AI Technical Foundations for Chief AI Officers — Course Index

A complete course for senior leaders and technical strategists. 14 modules, 20 episodes — from transformer internals to governance frameworks.

Read Full Course (long-form)

Module 1

  1. From Turing to the First AI Winter: Promises and Limits of Symbolic AI~36 min
  2. AlexNet to GPT-4: The Deep Learning Renaissance and Scaling Arc~37 min

Module 2

  1. The Training Loop: Loss, Gradients, and Why Adam Replaced SGD~38 min
  2. Pretraining vs. Fine-Tuning: The Paradigm Shift That Defines Modern AI~36 min

Module 3

  1. Attention Mechanisms: Self-Attention, Multi-Head, and What Transformers Actually Compute~35 min
  2. MoE Architecture: How GPT-4, Gemini, and Mixtral Actually Work~39 min
  3. Flash Attention and KV Cache: The Engineering That Makes Inference Possible~39 min

Module 4

  1. Chinchilla Scaling Laws: Why Frontier Models Are Deliberately Overtrained~35 min
  2. LoRA and QLoRA: How Fine-Tuning Actually Works in 2025~44 min

Module 5

  1. RLHF: The Pipeline That Made ChatGPT Possible and Its Limits~36 min
  2. DPO and Constitutional AI: The Alignment Techniques That Replaced RLHF~35 min

Module 6

  1. Test-Time Compute Scaling: The New Axis of AI Capability~35 min

Module 7

  1. Mamba and State Space Models: The Transformer's Most Serious Challenger~36 min

Module 8

  1. Post-Hoc XAI to Mechanistic Interpretability: What We Actually Know~35 min

Module 9

  1. The Attack Surface of AI Systems: Adversarial Examples, Prompt Injection, and Model Theft~37 min

Module 10

  1. RAG in Production and Agentic Systems: The Architecture of Enterprise AI~36 min

Module 11

  1. Benchmarks, Saturation, and Evaluation Incommensurability~35 min

Module 12

  1. The Memory Wall, GPU Architecture, and Compute Geopolitics~45 min

Module 13

  1. LLMOps: Prompt Versioning, Eval Pipelines, and Production Monitoring~36 min

Module 14

  1. Technical Risk and Governance Frameworks: What Policy Gets Right and Wrong~35 min