Applied AI Theory Toolkit
What you need to know about LLMs to use them well.
Course content. Working with AI is like speaking a foreign language: you can improvise with gestures and a few broken words, but knowing the grammar is what makes you proficient. This class gives you operational knowledge on large language models (LLMs), the engines behind what we commonly call "AI", so that you can use them most efficiently for your research.
You learn what a large language model is, how it works and how it is created, and what limits and interests preside over its creation. You also learn what this means for your interactions with an LLM and, from there, the fundamentals of agentic AI system design. All theoretical learning will be supported with practical exercises that help you get a material sense for it, through hands-on interactions with the LLM.
Goals. You learn to:
- connect your experience of AI chatbots with the nature of LLMs;
- recognise and fight LLMs' structural limitations, such as hallucinations (invented facts and sources), sycophancy (telling you what you want to hear), context rot (losing track in long conversations) and statelessness (the model itself remembers nothing between conversations);
- identify and put to use their inherent strengths, such as pattern recognition, connection, and work with language and qualitative data;
- identify some of the economic, cultural and geopolitical forces and interests that shape current LLMs;
- use, in an informed way, the fundamentals of agentic AI system building, such as context engineering, meta-prompting or iterative design;
- consciously draw on the human skills that may give you an advantage in using AI, such as the knowledge of your field, critical and systematic thinking, slowing down and cutting work into steps, reading in depth and at speed;
- judge which tasks to hand to a model, and which to keep for yourself.
Format. Every course can take different shapes: in person, online or both, as one intensive block or spread over several weeks, shorter or longer. Length, format and all practical details are open: we agree them together, and I adapt the course to what your institution needs.