MSc Applied AI Systems

Artificial Intelligence · Live · v0

Applied AI systems end to end — mathematical foundations, model architectures, training, and production deployment.

Deadline: Next cohort starts 2026-09-07 (AY 2026/27)
Length: 42 weeks · 42 phases
Cortex Credits (CC): 126 CC
What are Cortex Credits?
Syllabus: View the phase syllabus

Phase 00 — Foundations

Phase 01 — Hardware & Computing Substrate

Phase 02 — Numerical Representation

Phase 03 — Linear Algebra from First Principles

Phase 04 — Calculus & Optimization for AI

Phase 05 — Probability & Information Theory

Phase 06 — Python for AI Engineering

Phase 07 — Scalar Autograd from Scratch (`minigrad.scalar`)

Phase 08 — Tensor Autograd from Scratch

Phase 09 — MLP, Modules, and Optimizers

Phase 10 — Initialization, Normalization, Residuals

Phase 11 — Tokenization Theory + BPE Implementation

Phase 12 — The Corpus: Designing the Microscopic Dataset

Phase 13 — Embeddings & Representation Spaces

Phase 14 — Pre-Transformer Sequence Models

Phase 15 — Attention from Scratch

Phase 16 — Positional Encodings

Phase 17 — Tiny Transformer Block & Mini-GPT

Phase 18 — Training Loop, Checkpointing, Mixed-Precision Preview

Phase 19 — Training Dynamics & Debugging

Phase 20 — Evaluation Harness

Phase 21 — Inference Internals & Sampling

Phase 22 — KV Cache: From Math to Memory

Phase 23 — GPU Architecture Fundamentals

Phase 24 — CUDA & Triton Hands-On

Phase 25 — PyTorch Internals

Phase 26 — Quantization Deep Dive

Phase 27 — Modern Attention Optimizations

Phase 28 — Fine-Tuning, LoRA, QLoRA

Phase 29 — Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Phase 30 — Structured Generation & Constrained Decoding

Phase 31 — Tool Use & the Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Phase 32 — Agents: Planning, Memory, Sandboxing (Capstone Application)

Phase 33 — Inference Serving: From FastAPI to Continuous Batching

Phase 34 — Observability, Cost & Capacity

Phase 35 — Distributed Training & Inference

Phase 36 — Frontier Architectures

Phase 37 — Security & Safety of AI Systems

Phase 38 — MLOps

Phase 39 — Capstone: The Miniature Production System

Phase 40 — Hardening, Postmortem, "What's Next"

Phase 41 — Learner Portal: Delivering the Curriculum to Many
Enrolment prerequisites: A verified account and admissions-committee approval.

Professor: Borja Tarraso — Founder & Chief