In September 2024 ACTION, co-PI Dawn Song (UC Berkeley) will launch a massive open online course (MOOC) focused on Large Language Model Agents. She developed the MOOC with a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, and has arranged for a dozen guest speakers from leading organizations in the space of AI.
The description from the course website reads:
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized a wide range of domains. In particular, LLMs have been developed as agents to interact with the world and handle various tasks. With the continuous advancement of LLM techniques, LLM agents are set to be the upcoming breakthrough in AI, and they are going to transform the future of our daily life with the support of intelligent task automation and personalization. In this course, we will first discuss fundamental concepts that are essential for LLM agents, including the foundation of LLMs, essential LLM abilities required for task automation, as well as infrastructures for agent development. We will also cover representative agent applications, including code generation, robotics, web automation, medical applications, and scientific discovery. Meanwhile, we will discuss limitations and potential risks of current LLM agents, and share insights into directions for further improvement. Specifically, this course will include the following topics:
- Foundation of LLMs
- Reasoning
- Planning, tool use
- LLM agent infrastructure
- Retrieval-augmented generation
- Code generation, data science
- Multimodal agents, robotics
- Evaluation and benchmarking on agent applications
- Privacy, safety, and ethics
- Human-agent interaction, personalization, alignment
- Multi-agent collaboration
Song has arranged for an 8-week hackathon, mid-October to mid-December, in conjunction with the MOOC. Instruction is complemented by a Discord server.