Open Learning Series · Pedro L. Fernandez

AI Teaching Reference

Visual, beginner-friendly guides to the core concepts behind modern AI systems — from how language models work to agents, retrieval, and tooling protocols.

5 Guides
Visual Pipeline Diagrams
Classroom Ready
Free to Use & Share
Suggested reading order
1
LLM Fundamentals
Start here
2
RAG Pipeline
First technique
3
Model Context Protocol
Connecting tools
4
Agentic AI
Putting it together
🧠
Start Here

LLM Fundamentals

The essential vocabulary of large language models — what tokens are, how context windows work, why temperature controls creativity, and what causes hallucinations. Includes a clear breakdown of prompting vs RAG vs fine-tuning to help you pick the right tool for the job.

tokens context window temperature prompt engineering hallucinations fine-tuning
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Core Technique

RAG Pipeline

A visual walk-through of retrieval-augmented generation from raw documents to a grounded answer. Covers the offline indexing phase (chunking, embedding, vector index) and the online query phase (similarity search, prompt construction, generation).

chunking embeddings vector search cosine similarity grounding
📡
Protocol

Model Context Protocol

The open protocol that lets AI models connect to external tools, databases, and services in a standardized way. Covers the host-client-server architecture, the tool call lifecycle, and the three primitives — tools, resources, and prompts.

tools resources prompts JSON-RPC host · server
🤖
Advanced

Agentic AI

How AI agents move beyond single-shot Q&A to complete complex, multi-step tasks autonomously using reasoning loops, memory, and tools. Covers the ReAct cycle, agent architecture components, and three key patterns — single-agent, multi-agent, and plan-and-execute.

ReAct loop memory planning multi-agent tool use
Reference
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Reference

RAG Ecosystem

An enterprise reference map of the tools, platforms, and frameworks that make up the RAG landscape — vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, Amazon S3 Vectors), embedding models, orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex), and hosted RAG services.

vector databases LangChain LlamaIndex embedding models enterprise platforms