Applied AI Foundations

What you will be able to do

• Explain how a transformer turns a prompt into output, without hand-waving
• Predict the failure modes of a given AI feature before it ships
• Design an evaluation that would actually catch those failures
• Decide when a simpler, non-AI solution is the correct answer

Skills this course develops

Each maps to the same taxonomy your organization’s roles are defined in, so progress here moves your skill profile.

• Applied ML
• Model Evaluation
• Responsible AI
• Prompt Engineering

About this course

Most introductions to AI either hand-wave the mechanism or drown you in linear algebra. This one does neither. You will build a working mental model of how modern language and vision models produce output, learn to reason about where they fail, and finish able to judge whether a proposed AI feature is a good idea before anyone writes code. No calculus is assumed; careful thinking is.

Requirements

• Comfort with basic algebra and reading a chart
• No programming required, though examples include Python

Your instructor

Dr. Amara Okonkwo

Principal Researcher, Applied AI, Meridian Institute

4.9Rated 4.9 out of 552.9K learners4 courses

Amara's research sits at the join between machine learning systems and the people who have to use them. She published on evaluation and failure modes long before it was a crowded field, and she teaches the subject the way she researches it — starting from what breaks. She is a firm believer that anyone who can reason carefully can learn this material, and she has restructured her introductory course four times to prove it.

What learners say

• 

  Ewan MacLeodTeam Lead

  Rated 5.0 out of 510 months ago

  The AI tutor is the thing I did not expect to use and now cannot do without. Asking it to re-explain a concept in a different way, with the lesson already in context, saved me hours of re-watching.

  Helpful · 46
• 

  Hannah WeissL&D Manager

  Rated 5.0 out of 59 months ago

  Rolled this out to fourteen people. Twelve finished, which for us is unheard of. The pacing is right and nobody complained about the length, which is the real test.

  Helpful · 41
• 

  Aisha RahmanConsultant

  Rated 4.0 out of 51 month ago

  Strong material and well produced. I would have liked more exercises in the later modules — the earlier ones set a high bar and the end feels slightly lecture-heavy by comparison.

  Helpful · 36