# LLM From Scratch to Product — Resources

## Knowledge

- [Video: "Intro to Large Language Models" — Andrej Karpathy (YouTube, 1hr)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g)
  Best non-technical intro to what LLMs actually are. Start here. No code required.

- [Video: "Let's build GPT from scratch" — Andrej Karpathy (YouTube, 2hr)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY)
  Builds a tiny GPT in Python from zero. Requires some Python. Use after Lesson 3.

- [Course: AI Engineering from Scratch — Rohit Ghumare](https://aiengineeringfromscratch.com/)
  503 lessons, 20 phases, 36.9k GitHub stars. Covers math → deep learning → transformers → LLMs → agents → production. Free, open source (MIT). Code: https://github.com/rohitg00/ai-engineering-from-scratch
  Use for: Phase 3 onwards (math intuition, PyTorch, transformer internals). NOT a starting point — assumes some mathematical comfort. Dip in per-topic rather than front-to-back.

- [Course: Practical Deep Learning for Coders — fast.ai](https://course.fast.ai/)
  Teaches ML by building real things first, theory later. Matches our approach.

- [Guide: Ollama — local LLM runner](https://ollama.ai/)
  Dead-simple tool to run LLMs locally. First hands-on tool we'll use.

- [Guide: "The Illustrated Transformer" — Jay Alammar](https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/)
  Best visual explanation of how the Transformer architecture works. Use when architecture matters.

- [Course: Hugging Face NLP Course](https://huggingface.co/learn/nlp-course/)
  Practical guide to using pretrained models. Relevant once we reach fine-tuning.

## Wisdom (Communities)

- [r/LocalLLaMA](https://reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA)
  High-signal community for running LLMs locally. Hardware advice, model recommendations, benchmark comparisons. Essential for our hardware setup.

- [r/MachineLearning](https://reddit.com/r/MachineLearning)
  More research-oriented. Good for "what's the state of the art" questions.

- [Hugging Face Discord](https://huggingface.co/join/discord)
  Active community for practical model use and fine-tuning questions.

## Gaps
- No beginner-friendly resource yet found for: "how to build a web UI around a local LLM"
- Need to find best Python crash course for absolute beginners (product-building framing)