Learn AI
Courses, prompt engineering guides, benchmarks, and AI directories.
Learn AI.
Free courses, prompt engineering guides, benchmark leaderboards, and directories to help you actually understand how these models work.
These are structured, mostly free courses that take you from zero to functional rather than a single blog post — several come from the model labs themselves, which means the material stays reasonably current with how the tools actually work today.
Hugging Face Courses
Free hands-on courses covering NLP, reinforcement learning, and AI agents, using only open models throughout.
LLM Course (Maxime Labonne)
End-to-end roadmap for getting into large language models, covering pre-training, fine-tuning, RLHF, and quantization with runnable notebooks.
- Build a Large Language Model From Scratch — Sebastian Raschka's guide to implementing an LLM from the ground up
- Build a Reasoning Model From Scratch — same author, focused on reasoning-model architecture and training
- Build a DeepSeek Model From Scratch — implementing DeepSeek-style architecture, training, and distillation
- Build an AI Agent From Scratch — covers tools, memory, planning, and multi-agent systems
- aman.ai — Stanford-style structured notes spanning AI, deep learning, and transformers
Getting good output from a model is a skill in itself, and these guides move past generic "write clear prompts" advice into documented, tested techniques from the labs and researchers who study this directly.
Prompt Engineering Guide (DAIR.AI)
The most cited reference for prompting strategies and tactics across model types.
Bypassing a chatbot's safety guardrails violates the terms of service of nearly every AI provider. The sources below exist mainly for AI safety research and red-teaming — use at your own risk, and expect account bans or model-side patching on flagged platforms.
L1B3RT4S
The most prolific and actively maintained jailbreak prompt collection, spanning nearly every major model and updated frequently as providers patch known bypasses.
UltraBr3aks
A newer, actively maintained jailbreak repository with a focus on current-generation frontier models rather than legacy bypasses.
If a tool's marketing claims sound too good to verify, this is where you actually check — these are independently run or crowd-voted rankings rather than vendor self-reporting, covering everything from general chat quality down to chess and Minecraft.
LM Arena
Open platform for crowdsourced AI benchmarking hosted by UC Berkeley SkyLab, using blind human voting.
- EQ-Bench — emotional intelligence benchmarks for language models
- Aider Polyglot / SWE-bench / LiveCodeBench — coding-specific leaderboards for real-world software engineering tasks
- MathArena / AIME leaderboards — mathematics competition benchmarks
- SpeechMap.AI — free speech and refusal-rate benchmarks across chatbots
- VoxelBench — Minecraft-based generation and reasoning benchmark
- Chess LLM Leaderboards — head-to-head chess performance across models
When you don't know the name of the tool you need yet, these directories help you browse by category rather than searching blind — useful for discovering niche or newer tools that haven't hit mainstream coverage.
For anyone going deeper than "using" AI into understanding how it actually works, these are the canonical curated lists and interactive tools researchers and engineers actually reference.
- Transformer Explainer — interactive, in-browser visualization of how transformer-based LLMs actually work
- Neural Network Playground — TensorFlow's classic browser-based neural net visualizer, no setup required
- MicroGPT / nanoGPT-style walkthroughs — minimal, readable implementations for understanding GPT architecture line by line