Upstage to Offer Free LLM Course with 'AI Big Four' Scholar Andrew Ng

2024.07.18. The Fair Economy — Artificial intelligence (AI) technology firm Upstage said on the 18th that it will offer a free course on developing large language models (LLMs) through the global online education platform DeepLearning.AI.

DeepLearning.AI is an education platform created by Andrew Ng, a professor at Stanford University in the United States and a pioneer of deep learning who is often called one of the world's four leading AI scholars.

According to Upstage, DeepLearning.AI hosts a range of AI courses, from Andrew Ng's specialization programs to those offered by big tech companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta Platforms and Microsoft. Upstage is the first Korean company to participate.

Upstage will offer an LLM pretraining course developed together with Andrew Ng, drawing on the company's experience building its own LLM, Solar. Pretraining is the process of teaching an AI model language skills based on vast amounts of text data, and it forms the core foundation of LLM development, enabling advanced natural language processing capabilities such as sentence generation and contextual reasoning.

Upstage CEO Kim Seong-hun and Chief Science Officer (CSO) Park Eun-jeong will personally guide learners through the entire pretraining process, from theoretical foundations and dataset preparation to model training and performance evaluation based on benchmark tests. The course will be conducted in English and is free for anyone with basic coding and machine learning knowledge.

In particular, the course will cover practical know-how, including how to reduce training costs by lightening parameters using the 'Depth Up-Scaling' (DUS) methodology, a core technology of Solar, and how to easily train additional data based on open-source pretrained models.

"I am delighted to teach Upstage's LLM pretraining know-how together with Andrew Ng, a world-renowned authority on deep learning research," said Kim Seong-hun, CEO of Upstage. "Going forward, Upstage will take the lead in helping more people around the world acquire the latest AI knowledge, based on our philosophy of 'benefiting the world with AI.'"