Learn how to create, train, and tweak large language models (LLMs) by building one from the ground up! Bestselling author Sebastian Raschka guides you step by step through creating your own LLM. Each stage is explained with clear text, diagrams, and examples. You’ll go from the initial design and creation, to pretraining on a general corpus, and on to fine-tuning for specific tasks. • Plan and code all the parts of an LLM comparable to GPT-2 • Prepare a dataset suitable for LLM training • Construct a complete training pipeline • Fine-tune LLMs for text classification and with your own data • Use human feedback to ensure your LLM follows instructions • Load pretrained weights into an LLM • Develop LLMs that follow human instructions This book takes you inside the AI black box to tinker with the internal systems that power generative AI. As you work through each key stage of LLM creation, you’ll develop an in-depth understanding of how LLMs work, their limitations, and their customization methods. Your LLM can be developed on an ordinary laptop, and used as your own personal assistant.This book is a practical and eminently-satisfying hands-on journey into the foundations of generative AI. Without relying on any existing LLM libraries, you’ll code a base model, evolve it into a text classifier, and ultimately create a chatbot that can follow your conversational instructions. And you’ll really understand it because you built it yourself! Readers need intermediate Python skills and some knowledge of machine learning. The LLM you create will run on any modern laptop and can optionally utilize GPUs.