Question 1

Is the Open Source AI Academy free?

Accepted Answer

Yes, 100% free. No sign-up, no credit card. All 15 modules, 18 lessons, and 45 quiz questions are accessible immediately. Your progress saves locally in your browser.

Question 2

What topics does the Open Source AI Academy cover?

Accepted Answer

The course covers Transformer architecture, Meta Llama 4, Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma, Hugging Face, quantization (GGUF, AWQ, GPTQ, EXL2), Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM, SGLang, LoRA/QLoRA fine-tuning, pre-training from scratch, RLHF/DPO/GRPO alignment, and production MLOps with Docker and Kubernetes.

Question 3

What is vLLM?

Accepted Answer

vLLM is the industry-standard engine for high-throughput production LLM serving. It uses PagedAttention for efficient GPU memory management and continuous batching for >90% GPU utilization.

Question 4

Do I need expensive hardware to run open-source models?

Accepted Answer

No. Many models can run on consumer GPUs (e.g., RTX 4090) or even CPUs via llama.cpp. The course covers deployment strategies for every budget, from Raspberry Pi edge devices to multi-GPU production clusters.

Model	Type	Active Params	Best For
Qwen3.6-27B	Dense	27B	Consistent high performance
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B	MoE	3B of 35B	Ultra-efficient inference

Family	Creator	Standout Feature
Phi-4	Microsoft	Small but mighty (14B rivals 70B models)
Command-R+	Cohere	Optimized for RAG & enterprise search
Yi-Lightning	01.AI	Chinese-English bilingual excellence

The Global Model Families

Beyond Llama & Mistral

Qwen (Alibaba)

Google Gemma 4

Other Notable Families