Generative AI and Large Language Models

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Designed and lectured by Pr. Houichime at Ibn Tofaïl University, this course offers a technical deep dive into Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). The curriculum bridges the gap between foundational AI concepts and the sophisticated mathematical architectures that empower machines to comprehend and synthesize human language.

1. AI Paradigms: Analysis vs. Creation

Discriminative AI: Learns the boundaries between categories to classify data, such as identifying spam or labeling an image as a “cat”.

Generative AI: Learns the underlying structure and internal essence of data to produce new, original instances that resemble the training set.

2. Large Language Models (LLMs) & Transformers

The Fundamental Task: LLMs function by predicting the most probable next word in a sequence.

The Transformer Revolution: Unlike older models (RNNs) that struggled with short-term memory, Transformers use an attention mechanism to look at all previous words simultaneously.

Tokenization: Text is broken down into “atoms” called tokens, which can be words, characters, or groups of letters.

Semantic Embeddings: Tokens are converted into high-dimensional vectors (e.g., 12,288 dimensions for GPT-3) where words with similar meanings are mathematically closer to each other.

3. Inside the Decoder Block

Multi-Head Attention: Acts like a committee of experts, with each “head” analyzing the text from a different perspective, such as grammar or context.

Feed-Forward Networks (FFN): These layers “digest” the information gathered by attention to find complex, non-linear patterns.

Residual Connections (Add & Norm): These maintain a “backup copy” of the original input to ensure the model doesn’t lose the initial word’s meaning during complex calculations.

4. The Learning Algorithm

Forward Pass: The model makes a prediction and produces a probability distribution across its entire vocabulary.

Loss Function: Measures the “surprise” or error by comparing the prediction to the actual ground truth.

Backpropagation: The error signal flows backward through the network, assigning “responsibility” to every weight in the model.

Gradient Descent: An optimizer adjusts the weights in the opposite direction of the error to minimize future mistakes.

📥 Downloads & Resources

Access the full course materials and practical exercises below:

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