This schedule outlines lectures and MP milestones.
MPs typically release Tuesday after class; they are due Monday AoE before class. Required readings will be posted on Piazza before each lecture.
| Week | Date | Lecture | MP Milestones |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aug 25 | 1. Course Introduction | Release MP0 |
| Aug 27 | 2. AI Computing Stack | ||
| 2 | Sep 1 | 3. PyTorch and Development Tools | |
| Sep 3 | 4. Guest Lecture: Google TPU Stack (Google, Srinatha Mandalapu) | ||
| 3 | Sep 8 | 5. Foundation Model (Tokenizer) | Team-up due; release MP1 |
| Sep 10 | 6. Foundation Model (Attention Mechanism) | ||
| 4 | Sep 15 | 7. Foundation Models III | MP0 due; MP1 CP1 due; release MP1 CP2 |
| Sep 17 | 8. Training Language Models I | ||
| 5 | Sep 22 | 9. Training Language Models II | |
| Sep 24 | 10. Guest Lecture | ||
| 6 | Sep 29 | 11. Scaling Laws | MP1 CP2 due; release MP1 CP3 |
| Oct 1 | 12. Finetuning I | ||
| 7 | Oct 6 | 13. Finetuning II | MP1 CP3 due; release MP1 CP4 |
| Oct 8 | 14. Alignment and Safety | ||
| 8 | Oct 13 | 15. Guest Lecture | MP1 CP4 due; release MP2; MP2 CP1 due |
| Oct 15 | 16. Inference Engine: Prefill/Decode | ||
| 9 | Oct 20 | 17. Inference Engine: KV Cache | MP2 CP2 due |
| Oct 22 | 18. Inference Engine: Speculative Decoding | ||
| 10 | Oct 27 | 19. Inference Engine: Optimization (Part 1) | MP2 CP3 due |
| Oct 29 | 20. Inference Engine: Optimization (Part 2) | ||
| 11 | Nov 3 | No class — Election Day | MP2 CP4 due |
| Nov 5 | Guest lecture by Sanjay Patel (NVIDIA) | ||
| 12 | Nov 10 | 22. Agentic AI and Applications | Release MP3 |
| Nov 12 | 23. Agentic AI Infrastructure | ||
| 13 | Nov 17 | 24. Guest Lecture | MP3 CP1 due; release MP3 CP2 |
| Nov 19 | 25. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) | ||
| 14 | Nov 24 | No class — Thanksgiving Break | |
| Nov 26 | |||
| 15 | Dec 1 | 26. RAG System Optimizations | Release MP3 CP3 |
| Dec 3 | 27. Advanced Topic: AI Chip Development | ||
| 16 | Dec 8 | 28. Advanced Topic: AI Infrastructure at Scale | MP3 CP2 due |
| Dec 10 | No class — Reading Day | ||
| 17 | Dec 17 | MP3 CP3 due |