Pillar 1: Foundation Models & Transformer Architecture. Self-attention mechanisms, tokenization, positional embeddings, context windows, and quantization techniques (GGUF, bitsandbytes 4-bit/8-bit).
Pillar 2: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Ingesting private company documents (PDFs, Confluence, SQL), recursive text chunking, embedding generation, vector similarity search, and reranking.
Pillar 3: Vector Databases & Semantic Search. Hands-on deployment of Milvus, Pinecone, ChromaDB, and pgvector in PostgreSQL for sub-second high-dimensional similarity queries.
Pillar 4: Autonomous AI Agents & Tool Calling. Building multi-agent systems using LangGraph, CrewAI, and OpenAI Assistants API where models reason, browse the web, write code, and execute external APIs.