Building Agentic AI: Workflows, Fine-Tuning, Optimization, and Deployment

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An Introduction to AI, LLMs, and Agents

Introduction

AI, and more recently large language models (LLMs), went from novelty to required software system building blocks in what felt like the blink of an eye. However, knowing how they work and when to use them still isn’t obvious to the average user. This chapter provides the bare minimum you need to know to build AI systems with confidence. It covers what an LLM is, how tokens and context windows shape behavior, why size and architecture matter, and where alignment shows up in real systems.

This chapter also introduces some vocabulary items that you will encounter throughout the book. It describes the two sides of LLMs’ family tree, the features of LLMs that can make them highly scalable, and ...