IISc Workshop - TECHO WORKSHOP SERIES’25

MASTERING GENERATIVE AI

Before:

I was definitely super excited to go for this workshop and was looking forward to all the new things I was going to learn. When I heard about the workshop, I immediately jumped on the opportunity to attend it because, it was being held in and marketed by IISc, one of the, if not, biggest names in this country as far as institutions are concerned. 

DAY 1:

The course began, as promised, at around 10 am. We started with a brief introduction to AI, ML, Data Science and DL, to lay out a good conceptual foundation before getting into it’s technicalities. A perfect way to start the course, by exploring the theory and history behind these concepts. We then got into the jargons of machine learning. Got a brief idea of the hyper parameters associated with training a model before taking a short break.

Post the short break we were playing around with some of the codes provided by our instructor, which gave us all a better understanding of how each parameter effects the outputs. 

Post lunch is when we started GenAI. Again, began with a bit of theory and then got into prompting. This took a major chunk of time, and got super boring. Our instructor was basically telling us how to use chatbots, without much useful information. Not very helpful but I think he ran out of content for the day. 

Overall, the instructor was good, not only was he a good teacher but also was he knowledgeable, unlike a lot of people who teach. He used good analogies too, which made it pretty interesting. 

DAY 2:

Went in with high expectations because the course structure had promised that we’d go in depth into LLMs, transformers and RL. We began with an introduction to LLMs and very briefly, how they work. Then our instructor was teaching us how to make a chatbot. Sounds great, right? Not really, because he was using ChatGPT to do so. He said the objective was to get the chatbots to do the work and not even write a single line of code, which definitely was NOT what I wanted out of the course, which was disappointing and honestly, painful. 

Post lunch was a bit into agent systems, nothing too much and he didn’t really provide the notes either. 

Overall, the course was a major disappointment but I met some good people, which was amazing. We got to explore quite a bit of the campus which was a great experience. Really pretty campus, had blocks for almost ANY department that one could think of. Full of beautiful, colourful plants, and also a bunch of animals, including monkeys. 

I definitely did get some information, which I will not deny, but it was not even close to what was promised. I did take notes, which I’ve compiled into a PDF file. 

Click here for the notes: IISc_Workshop_Notes