AI vs ML vs Deep Learning vs Generative AI
Understand the differences between artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI with practical examples.
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Every curriculum topic has a complete article with visual diagrams, practical examples, general AI context, and an AWS AI Practitioner exam connection where relevant.
Module 1 · Episodes 1–6
Build the vocabulary and decision-making foundation needed for every later AI topic.
Understand the differences between artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI with practical examples.
Learn the AI lifecycle from business problem and data preparation through training, deployment, monitoring, and improvement.
Compare supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning and learn when each machine learning approach is appropriate.
Learn fairness, transparency, privacy, safety, accountability, and other principles used to build trustworthy AI systems.
Explore common sources of AI bias, ethical risks, and methods for explaining model predictions to technical and business audiences.
Learn how artificial neurons, layers, weights, activation functions, and training work together in a neural network.
Module 2 · Episodes 7–11
Understand how neural networks learn, activate, train, infer, and recognize visual patterns.
Understand the perceptron as a basic artificial neuron and see how inputs, weights, bias, and activation produce a prediction.
Learn what weights and biases mean, how they influence predictions, and why training updates them.
Compare common neural-network activation functions and understand why nonlinearity is necessary for deep learning.
Understand the difference between learning model parameters during training and using the trained model for predictions during inference.
Learn how convolution, filters, feature maps, and pooling help CNNs recognize patterns in images.
Module 3 · Episodes 12–15
Move from sequence models to transformers and modern natural-language processing.
Learn how recurrent neural networks process sequences and why their hidden state provides short-term memory.
Understand how LSTM gates help neural networks preserve important information across longer sequences.
Learn how transformer architecture and self-attention capture relationships between tokens and power modern language models.
Learn how NLP enables computers to process, understand, classify, summarize, and generate human language.
Module 4 · Episodes 16–23
Learn how language becomes tokens, vectors, searchable meaning, and generated responses.
Understand how language models split text into tokens and why token counts affect context windows, latency, and cost.
Context windows define how much tokenized information a model can consider in one request and influence coherence, cost, and truncation.
Learn how embeddings convert text and other data into vectors that capture semantic relationships and similarity.
Understand vector search, similarity measures, vector databases, and their role in semantic search and RAG applications.
Semantic search retrieves information by meaning rather than relying only on exact keyword matches.
Attention lets a model assign different importance to parts of its input when building a contextual representation.
Foundation models are trained broadly and then adapted through prompting, retrieval, fine-tuning, or task-specific systems.
Learn what LLMs are, how they are trained, what they can do, and where limitations such as hallucinations arise.
Follow the path from prompt tokenization and model inference to token generation, safety checks, and the final response.
Module 5 · Episodes 24–30
Use generative AI effectively while understanding prompting, limitations, and hallucinations.
Learn practical zero-shot, few-shot, role, context, constraint, and step-based prompting techniques for generative AI.
Zero-shot prompts rely on instructions, while few-shot prompts add examples that demonstrate the expected pattern.
Generation controls shape how a model selects output tokens and balance predictability with variety.
Understand why language models can produce confident but unsupported answers and how grounding, retrieval, verification, and responsible design improve reliability.
Generative models are strong at transformation and synthesis but can be inaccurate, inconsistent, or unsuitable for unsupported high-impact decisions.
Useful GenAI projects connect a clear business workflow to measurable outcomes instead of deploying a model without a defined problem.
Evaluation combines task-specific quality measures, human review, safety testing, groundedness, latency, and cost.
Module 6 · Episodes 31–36
Connect models to trusted private knowledge, retrieval, and enterprise controls.
RAG retrieves relevant trusted information and supplies it to a generative model as context for an answer.
A RAG pipeline ingests documents, creates searchable representations, retrieves evidence, builds prompts, and evaluates answers.
Chunking divides source material into retrievable units while preserving enough context to answer accurately.
Vector databases store and index embeddings so applications can retrieve items with similar meaning efficiently.
Enterprise knowledge bases organize governed business information for search, RAG, support, and decision assistance.
RAG systems must enforce source permissions, protect sensitive data, resist prompt injection, and preserve auditability.
Module 7 · Episodes 37–42
Understand planning, tools, memory, orchestration, and agent safety.
An AI agent combines a model with goals, tools, state, and a control loop that selects and evaluates actions.
Tools let agents interact with controlled external capabilities such as search, databases, calendars, or business APIs.
Agent memory can retain conversation state, task history, user preferences, or retrieved facts with different lifetimes and controls.
Planning decomposes a goal into manageable actions and revises the path when observations change.
Agentic systems need bounded permissions, validation, monitoring, and human approval for consequential actions.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore provides managed capabilities for building, connecting, securing, and operating AI agents.
Module 8 · Episodes 43–54
Match business needs to Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, and purpose-built AWS AI services.
Amazon Bedrock is a managed service for building generative AI applications with foundation models and related capabilities.
Amazon SageMaker AI supports building, training, tuning, deploying, and governing machine-learning models.
Amazon Q provides generative AI assistance for workplace knowledge and software-development workflows.
Amazon Comprehend applies natural-language processing to extract insights such as entities, sentiment, and key phrases.
Amazon Rekognition analyzes images and video for objects, text, moderation signals, and other visual information.
Amazon Textract extracts printed text, handwriting, forms, and tables from documents into structured results.
Amazon Transcribe converts speech audio into text and supports transcription workflows.
Amazon Polly converts text into lifelike synthesized speech for voice-enabled applications.
Amazon Lex helps build conversational interfaces that recognize user intent and collect required information.
Service selection starts with the workload: custom ML, foundation-model applications, or a purpose-built API for text, speech, vision, or documents.
AI workload security combines identity, encryption, network controls, data protection, logging, and least privilege.
Architecture choices balance model capability, token or compute usage, latency, throughput, availability, and operational effort.
Module 9 · Episodes 55–59
Apply the concepts through document Q&A, search, chatbots, and automation projects.
A useful chatbot combines a defined audience, conversation design, trusted context, safety controls, and measurable success criteria.
Document Q&A retrieves evidence from approved files and generates answers that users can trace back to sources.
Semantic search projects use embeddings and similarity retrieval to find relevant information despite vocabulary differences.
AI automation combines model judgment with deterministic workflow steps, approvals, and recovery paths.
Production AI projects need repeatable evaluations, operational telemetry, feedback, and change management.
Module 10 · Episodes 60–64
Use AI to strengthen test design, automation, analysis, and quality workflows.
AI can support test ideation, prioritization, analysis, and maintenance while testers retain responsibility for risk and evidence.
Models can propose test scenarios from requirements, but coverage and correctness require review against product risks.
AI can help draft and maintain Playwright tests when locators, assertions, data, and failure handling remain explicit and reviewable.
AI can summarize logs, cluster failures, and suggest hypotheses while engineers validate the actual root cause.
Testing AI-enabled products includes quality, fairness, privacy, robustness, explainability, and misuse considerations.
Module 11 · Episodes 65–69
Review exam domains, scenarios, services, responsible AI, and study strategy.
The exam evaluates foundational AI, generative AI, foundation-model applications, responsible AI, and security and governance concepts.
A domain review connects each official objective to concepts, business scenarios, AWS services, and responsible-use decisions.
Scenario questions become easier when you isolate the requirement, constraint, distractors, and best-fit AWS capability.
Effective practice mixes recall, scenario reasoning, timed sets, explanation review, and targeted revision.
A final study plan prioritizes the official guide, high-weight domains, service use cases, responsible AI, and calm exam execution.