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Foundation Model Engineering: A 20-Chapter Open Textbook for Engineers Past the API-Call Stage
Seongeun So maintains a free online textbook, last updated September 15, aimed at readers who want to move past surface-level API usage into how foundation model systems actually work. Twenty chapters with five to seven subsections each run from symbolism versus connectionism and RNNs through Transformers and MoE, scaling laws and RLHF, Flash Attention, quantization, speculative decoding, retrieval, multimodal learning, state space models and mechanistic interpretability, with PyTorch examples, quizzes and interactive visualizers. It is explicitly a living document, so the publication date is a moving target rather than a fixed byline.
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