A 8-month syllabus to get up to Speed on NLP and LLMs. From Zero to Hero

Month 1-2: Deep Dive into Deep Learning Fundamentals

1. Deep Learning Specialization by Andrew Ng (Coursera)
   • Topics: Deep Neural Networks, CNNs, Sequence models, etc.
   • Link to Course
2. Book: Deep Learning by Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville.
   • Focus especially on the chapters related to RNNs and LSTMs.
   • Link to Book

Month 3: Natural Language Processing (NLP) Basics

1. Stanford's Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning (CS224N)
   • Course Videos
   • Course Page
2. Implement Basic NLP tasks:
   • Text classification, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis.
   • Link to GitHub Repos

Month 4: Deep Learning in Production

1. Full Stack Deep Learning Course
   • Topics: Infrastructure, Tooling, Data Management, Modeling, Deployment, Monitoring, Maintenance.
   • Course Link
2. Additional Reading:
   • Building Machine Learning Powered Applications: Going from Idea to Product by Emmanuel Ameisen.

Month 5: Advanced NLP Techniques

1. Hugging Face's Transformers Library
   • Documentation & Tutorials
2. Research Papers:
   • Attention is All You Need by Vaswani et al.
   • BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding by Devlin et al.
3. Practical NLP Book
   • Link to Book's Github

Month 6: Introduction to Large Language Models (LLMs)

1. OpenAI's GPT-2 & GPT-3 Papers
   • Dive deep into the architecture, training procedure, and innovations.
   • Link to OpenAI's Blog & Papers

Month 7: Experiment, Implement & Fine-tune Models

1. Deep Learning for Text and Sequences (Coursera/DeepLearning.AI)
   • Course Link
2. Work on a Project
   • Choose an NLP problem.
   • Implement a solution using a transformer model.
   • Kaggle or NLP Progress for datasets.

Month 8: Research, Ethics, and Best Practices

1. Research Paper Reading & Implementation
   • Select papers from NLP conferences (ACL, NAACL, EMNLP) and attempt replication.
2. AI Ethics in NLP
   • Fairness and Abstraction in Sociotechnical Systems by Selbst et al.
   • Ethics in NLP Course
3. NLP Best Practices
   • Microsoft's NLP Best Practices GitHub

---

Throughout these 8 months, constantly keep track of new research, articles, and tutorials. The field of NLP and LLMs is fast-paced, so staying updated will be key to your success.