Getting Started with Local LLMs
Chapter 1: Introduction to Large Language Models
What Is a Large Language Model (LLM)?
A Simple View of How LLMs Work
Understanding Tokens and Text Generation
Why Run LLMs Locally?
Local vs. Cloud-Based LLMs
Quiz for Chapter 1
Chapter 2: Preparing Your Local Environment
Hardware Considerations: CPU
Hardware Considerations: RAM
Hardware Considerations: GPU and VRAM
Checking Your System Specifications
Operating System Compatibility
Installing Python (Optional but Recommended)
Introduction to the Command Line / Terminal
Quiz for Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Finding and Selecting Local LLMs
Where to Find LLM Models: Hugging Face Hub
Understanding Model Sizes and Parameters
Model Formats: GGUF and Others
Quantization: Making Models Smaller
Reading Model Cards for Information
Model Licenses and Usage Restrictions
Choosing Your First Model
Quiz for Chapter 3
Chapter 4: Running Your First Local LLM
Introduction to Local LLM Runners
Setting up Ollama
Downloading a Model with Ollama
Running a Model with Ollama (Command Line)
Setting up LM Studio
Finding and Downloading Models in LM Studio
Loading and Chatting with a Model in LM Studio
Introduction to llama.cpp (Concept)
Hands-on Practical: Running a Model
Quiz for Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Basic Interaction and Prompting
What is a Prompt?
Your First Prompt: Simple Questions
Giving Instructions
Understanding Context Window
Basic Prompt Formatting Tips
Temperature and Creativity
Common Interaction Patterns
Practice: Simple Prompting Techniques
Quiz for Chapter 5
Your First Prompt: Simple Questions
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- Attention Is All You Need, Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, 2017 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS 2017) DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762 - Foundational paper introducing the Transformer architecture, which is key to modern Large Language Models and their ability to process and generate text.
- OpenAI Prompt Engineering Guide, OpenAI, 2023 (OpenAI) - Official guide offering practical advice and techniques for designing effective prompts to interact with large language models, beginning with initial concepts.
- Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, Daniel Jurafsky, James H. Martin, 2025 (Prentice Hall) - A widely used textbook for natural language processing, covering the theoretical basis of language models and text generation.