Make money doing the work you believe in
I've tested every FREE AI course from MIT, Stanford, DeepMind, and Berkeley.
8 survived. $120K worth of education. $0.
Most engineers hoard 50 courses and finish none. This stack is sequenced so you finish all 8:
1️⃣ Foundations: MIT 6.S191
Deep learning from zero. Neural nets, CNNs, transformers, generative models.
The fastest on-ramp that exists. 10 lectures.
Skip: Andrew Ng's older Coursera courses. This covers more in less time.
2️⃣ Build a GPT from scratch: Karpathy's Zero to Hero
Backprop by hand. Tokenization. Attention. Build GPT from an empty file.
Skip: every "transformer explained" blog post. This is the source.
3️⃣ Language models deep: Stanford CS336
Data preprocessing. Scaling laws. Evals. Reasoning.
The course most ML engineers wish existed when they started.
Skip: generic "intro to LLMs" content. This assumes you can code.
4️⃣ Computer vision: UMich Deep Learning for CV
CNNs to modern vision architectures. Detection. Segmentation. Generation.
Skip: OpenCV tutorials. This teaches the models, not the library.
5️⃣ Generative AI: Stanford CS236
Diffusion models. VAEs. Flows. Image synthesis.
The theory behind Stable Diffusion and DALL-E explained properly.
Skip: "how to use Midjourney" content. This teaches how it works.
6️⃣ Reinforcement learning: DeepMind x UCL RL Course
Policy optimization. Value learning. Planning.
RL powers reasoning in every frontier model. This is the foundation.
Skip: OpenAI Gym toy tutorials. This is production RL theory.
7️⃣ AI agents: Berkeley LLM Agents
Planning engines. Tool use. Reasoning systems.
Taught by practitioners who've built real agent systems.
Skip: LangChain YouTube tutorials. This teaches architecture, not wrappers.
8️⃣ ML systems: Stanford MLSys Seminars
System architecture. Productionization. Performance tuning.
The bridge between "my model works in a notebook" and "my model runs in production."
Skip: MLOps certification programs. This is free and better.
💸 CS degree: $120,000+
💸 This stack: $0
The engineers learning from these playlists aren't paying $120K.
They're outperforming the ones who did.
The order matters. Each course builds on the last.
Which course are you starting? 👇
💾 Bookmark this before you waste money on another bootcamp.
♻️ Repost for someone still paying for AI education that's free