Andrew Ng and Upstage Launches New Course on Pretraining LLMs

In a new development for AI enthusiasts and professionals, Andrew Ng and Upstage have announced a new short course focused on pretraining LLMs available through DeepLearning.AI. 

This course is headed by Upstage’s CEO, Sung Kim, and CSO, Lucy Park, who bring their extensive expertise in AI and machine learning to the forefront.

It aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the LLM pre-training pipeline, catering to those who find prompting or fine-tuning existing models insufficient for specialised domains or languages with limited representation. 

A key feature of the course is a practical use case that compares the output of a base model with its fine-tuned and further pretrained variants in writing Python code, allowing participants to observe the impact of pretraining firsthand.

The godfather of deep learning

Earlier this year Andrew Ng, came up with a new course called ‘Building Your Own Database Agent’, this time, in collaboration with generative AI giant Microsoft.

Offered for free, this beginner-level course teaches you how to interact with tabular data and SQL databases using natural language, making data analysis more efficient and accessible.

Led by Adrian Gonzalez Sanchez, data and AI specialist at Microsoft, in one hour, you will gain hands-on experience with the Azure OpenAI Service, learning techniques such as RAG and function calling, among others.

Upstage to Upscale 

One standout South Korean AI startup amid these remarkable developments is Upstage. With a fresh $72 million in funding in the first quarter of this year alone, the startup achieved new orders worth about 10 billion won for its Document AI solution and Solar LLM API, doubling the orders it received last year.  

Founded in 2020, it began as a document heritage provider, collaborating with major insurance, banking, and logistics companies to transform Korean documents and PDFs into machine-readable data.

Existing models like GPT struggle with Korean language data, which influenced Upstage to develop their own LLM, Solar.