Cohort: 1 May — 30 June 2026

Your First Break in AI

A free, community-driven cohort to learn AI training, inference, and product building — from first commit to capstone.

100% free. No applications. No prerequisites.

Watch the Cohort Introduction

10 minutes that walk through the six stages of the journey, the roadmap, and how to get started with your first break in AI.

Six stages from first commit to capstone

A structured learning path that takes you from setting up a blog to training models and shipping AI-powered products — all in two months.

Stage 1

Ship something real

Set up a Quarto blog hosted on GitHub. Learn Git basics, GitHub Pages, and how AI-based IDEs like Cursor and Claude Code work in practice.

Stage 2

See inside the machine

Run Qwen3 0.6B locally in pure C. Trace every operation from tokenization to token output. Understand transformers, self-attention, KV cache, and chat templates.

Stage 3

Think at production scale

Go beyond running a model. Learn inference engines (vLLM, llama.cpp), continuous batching, quantization (GGUF, GPTQ, AWQ), speculative decoding, and structured output.

Stage 4

Train your own

PyTorch fundamentals, LoRA and QLoRA fine-tuning, distributed training with DDP and FSDP, experiment tracking with Weights & Biases, and the nanoGPT speedrun.

Stage 5

Ship a product

Build an AI-powered product end to end — from idea to deployed application. APIs, RAG, agents, tool use, frontend integration, monitoring, and iteration.

Stage 6

Prove it

Capstone project or meaningful open-source contribution. Deploy, document, present to the cohort, and add it to your public portfolio.

Who this cohort is for

Students, professionals, career switchers, and the simply curious. It doesn't matter what you studied or where you work — what matters is that you're ready to learn by doing. No applications, no prerequisites, no cost. Follow the roadmap, build in the open, and let your work speak for itself.

The cohort is led by FireHacker (Amardeep Singh Sidhu), founder of AIEdx. Most learning is self-directed and peer-supported; the roadmap, checklist, and resources live in the open so you can contribute and others can follow.

Ready to start?

Join learners on Discord and take your first break in AI. The cohort is live now — May through June 2026.

Or go directly to the cohort site at cohort.bubblnet.com