ai-hands-on

ai-hands-on

A group of notebooks and other files which can help you learn AI from scratch.

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A complete, hands-on guide to becoming an AI Engineer. This repository is designed to help you learn AI from first principles, build real neural networks, and understand modern LLM systems end-to-end. Progress through math, PyTorch, deep learning, transformers, RAG, and OCR with clean, intuitive Jupyter notebooks guiding you at every step. Suitable for beginners and engineers leveling up, providing clarity, structure, and intuition to build real AI systems.

README:

AI Engineering: Hands-on

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A complete, hands-on guide to becoming an AI Engineer.

This repository is designed to help you learn AI from first principles, build real neural networks, and understand modern LLM systems end-to-end. You'll progress through math, PyTorch, deep learning, transformers, RAG, and OCR — with clean, intuitive Jupyter notebooks guiding you at every step.

Whether you're a beginner or an engineer levelling up, this repo gives you the clarity, structure, and intuition needed to build real AI systems.

⭐ Star This Repo

If you learn something useful, a star is appreciated.

Repository Structure

1. Math Fundamentals

  • Math functions, derivatives, vectors, and gradients
  • Matrix operations and linear algebra
  • Probability and statistics

2. PyTorch Basics

  • Creating and manipulating tensors
  • Matrix multiplication, transposing, and reshaping
  • Indexing, slicing, and concatenating tensors
  • Special tensor creation functions

3. Neural-Network(NN)

  • Building neurons, layers, and networks from scratch
  • Normalization techniques (RMSNorm)
  • Activation functions
  • Optimizers (Adam, Muon) and learning rate decay

4. Transformers

  • Attention and self-attention mechanisms
  • Multi-head attention
  • Decoder-only transformer architecture

5. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

  • Building RAG pipelines end to end
  • Indexing, retrieval, chunking strategies
  • Integrations with embedding models and vector stores

6. Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

  • OCR pipeline and utilities
  • Preprocessing images and extracting text

Books

Recommended reading to deepen your understanding (not included):

  • AI Engineering by Chip Huyen
  • Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron
  • Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville
  • The Elements of Statistical Learning by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman
  • Neural Networks and Deep Learning by Michael Nielsen
  • SQL Cookbook by Anthony Molinaro

For more books in AI/ML, I have created another repo for this Check Here. I will be adding lot more in coming days/months. If you are interested to read book, go check this repo out.

Learning Path

For a recommended step-by-step progression through the materials, see the Learning Path:

  • Start_here/learning_path.md

Requirements

Install dependencies with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Some subfolders (for example 5.RAG/ and 6.OCR/) include their own requirements.txt with additional dependencies.

Usage

Recommended workflow:

  1. Open Jupyter in the project root:

    jupyter lab
    # or
    jupyter notebook
  2. Work through notebooks in order:

    • 1.Math/
    • 2.PyTorch/
    • 3.Neural-Network(NN)/
    • 4.Transformer/
  3. Folder to run separately:

    • 5.RAG/
    • 6.OCR/
  4. Resources

  5. Basic ML Model Implementation (Supervised + Un-supervised + RL)

    • 1.Linear Regression
    • 2.Logistic Regression
    • 3.Decision Tree Model
    • 4.Naive Bayes Classification

Machine Learning Frameworks

Tool Category Link
Scikit-learn Traditional ML https://scikit-learn.org/stable/
XGBoost Gradient Boosting https://xgboost.ai/
LightGBM Gradient Boosting https://lightgbm.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
CatBoost Gradient Boosting https://catboost.ai/

GEN AI References

Resource Focus Area Link
Microsoft Generative AI for Beginners Intro to GenAI https://github.com/microsoft/generative-ai-for-beginners
Generative AI for Everyone Non-technical overview https://www.coursera.org/learn/generative-ai-for-everyone
Building Blocks of Generative AI Conceptual foundations https://shriftman.substack.com/p/the-building-blocks-of-generative
The Illustrated Transformer Transformers https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/
LLMs Explained Briefly LLM basics video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPZh9BOjkQs
Intro to LLMs LLM overview video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g
Understanding LLMs Deep dive https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/understanding-large-language-models
Visual Guide to Reasoning LLMs Reasoning models https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-to-reasoning-llms
Understanding Reasoning LLMs Reasoning theory https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/understanding-reasoning-llms
Understanding Multimodal LLMs Vision + text models https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/understanding-multimodal-llms
Visual Guide to MoE Mixture of Experts https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-to-mixture-of-experts
Finetuning LLMs Model training https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/finetuning-large-language-models
How Transformer LLMs Work Architecture https://www.deeplearning.ai/short-courses/how-transformer-llms-work/
Build GPT from Scratch Hands-on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY
LLM Course (GitHub) Structured learning https://github.com/mlabonne/llm-course
LLM Course (Hugging Face) Practical LLMs https://huggingface.co/learn/llm-course/chapter1/1
Awesome LLM Apps Project ideas https://github.com/Shubhamsaboo/awesome-llm-apps
How RAG Enhances LLMs RAG https://awesomeneuron.substack.com/p/how-rag-enhances-llms-a-step-by-step
Visual Guide to AI Agents AI Agents https://awesomeneuron.substack.com/p/a-visual-guide-to-ai-agents

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

Please ensure:

  • Notebooks are clean (Restart & Run All before committing)
  • Existing structure & naming conventions are followed
  • PRs are focused, readable, and documented
  • In folders like RAG and OCR, please maintain the cleaned structure part
  • If you want to add something new folders, make it proper structure way.

License

  • This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

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