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.

License	Commercial Use	Modify?	Examples
Apache 2.0	✅ Unrestricted	✅ Yes	Mistral Large 3, Gemma 4, Qwen 3
MIT	✅ Unrestricted	✅ Yes	DeepSeek-V3, DeepSeek-R1
Llama Community	⚠️ Restricted >700M MAU	✅ Yes	Llama 4 Scout/Maverick
Research Only	❌ No	✅ Yes	Some academic models

Licensing: Open Weights vs Open Source

Understanding AI Model Licenses

License Comparison

The Ecosystem Map (April 2026)