Generative AI for Beginners: Concepts + Claude Code Build

About this course

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.---Most people learning about generative AI end up in one of two places. Either they collect vocabulary — LLM, RAG, embeddings, agents — without ever being able to say what any of it means, or they get buried in maths and papers written for people who already know the answer. Neither leaves you able to do anything.

This course is the middle. It explains the ideas properly, in plain English, and then puts you in front of a blank file and has you build a real AI app from it. No programming background required, and none acquired along the way — you describe what you want in English, and an AI assistant writes the code.

What you'll actually understand by the end

We start with the thing everyone skips: what generative AI is, and how it differs from artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. These four words get used interchangeably in the press and they are not interchangeable. Once you can separate them, a lot of confusing coverage becomes readable.

From there you'll take a guided tour inside a real AI assistant — not a slideshow about one. You'll see what it does well, and you'll see it confidently invent a fact that does not exist, which is the single most important behaviour to witness early rather than discover later.

Then the core ideas, one lecture each. Large language models: what they're doing when they answer you, at a level you can explain to someone else. Prompt engineering: the small number of habits that separate a prompt that works from one that doesn't, including the four mistakes almost everyone makes. Embeddings: what it means for a machine to represent meaning as numbers, and why that unlocks search that understands you. Fine-tuning: what it is, and — more usefully — when you almost certainly don't need it. RAG: how you get a model to answer from your documents instead of its memory. Agentic AI: what

Prices, discounts and availability are set by Udemy. We may earn a commission when you purchase through links on this site.