21 Lessons teaching everything you need to know to start building Generative AI applications

🌐 Multi-Language Support

Supported via GitHub Action (Automated & Always Up-to-Date)

Arabic | Bengali | Bulgarian | Burmese (Myanmar) | Chinese (Simplified) | Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong) | Chinese (Traditional, Macau) | Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan) | Croatian | Czech | Danish | Dutch | Estonian | Finnish | French | German | Greek | Hebrew | Hindi | Hungarian | Indonesian | Italian | Japanese | Kannada | Khmer | Korean | Lithuanian | Malay | Malayalam | Marathi | Nepali | Nigerian Pidgin | Norwegian | Persian (Farsi) | Polish | Portuguese (Brazil) | Portuguese (Portugal) | Punjabi (Gurmukhi) | Romanian | Russian | Serbian (Cyrillic) | Slovak | Slovenian | Spanish | Swahili | Swedish | Tagalog (Filipino) | Tamil | Telugu | Thai | Turkish | Ukrainian | Urdu | Vietnamese

Prefer to Clone Locally?

This repository includes 50+ language translations which significantly increases the download size. To clone without translations, use sparse checkout:

Bash / macOS / Linux:

git clone --filter=blob:none --sparse https://github.com/microsoft/generative-ai-for-beginners.git
cd generative-ai-for-beginners
git sparse-checkout set --no-cone '/*' '!translations' '!translated_images'

CMD (Windows):

git clone --filter=blob:none --sparse https://github.com/microsoft/generative-ai-for-beginners.git
cd generative-ai-for-beginners
git sparse-checkout set --no-cone "/*" "!translations" "!translated_images"

This gives you everything you need to complete the course with a much faster download.

Generative AI for Beginners (Version 3) - A Course

Learn the fundamentals of building Generative AI applications with our 21-lesson comprehensive course by Microsoft Cloud Advocates.

🌱 Getting Started

This course has 21 lessons. Each lesson covers its own topic so start wherever you like!

Lessons are labeled either "Learn" lessons explaining a Generative AI concept or "Build" lessons that explain a concept and code examples in both Python and TypeScript when possible.

For .NET Developers checkout Generative AI for Beginners (.NET Edition)!

Each lesson also includes a "Keep Learning" section with additional learning tools.

What You Need

To run the code of this course, you can use either:

• Azure OpenAI Service - Lessons: "aoai-assignment"

• Microsoft Foundry Models - Lessons: "githubmodels" (GitHub Models is retiring at the end of July 2026 - use Microsoft Foundry Models instead)

• OpenAI API - Lessons: "oai-assignment"

• Foundry Local - Run models fully offline on your own device, no cloud subscription required

• Basic knowledge of Python or TypeScript is helpful - *For absolute beginners check out these Python and TypeScript courses

• A GitHub account to fork this entire repo to your own GitHub account

We have created a Course Setup lesson to help you with setting up your development environment.

Don't forget to star (🌟) this repo to find it easier later.

🧠 Ready to Deploy?

If you are looking for more advanced code samples, check out our collection of Generative AI Code Samples in both Python and TypeScript.

🗣️ Meet Other Learners, Get Support

Join our official Microsoft Foundry Discord server to meet and network with other learners taking this course and get support.

Ask questions or share product feedback in our Microsoft Foundry Developer Forum on Github.

🚀 Building a Startup?

Visit Microsoft for Startups to find out how to get started building with Azure credits today.

🙏 Want to help?

Do you have suggestions or found spelling or code errors? Raise an issue or Create a pull request

📂 Each lesson includes:

• A short video introduction to the topic
• A written lesson located in the README
• Python and TypeScript code samples supporting Azure OpenAI and OpenAI API
• Links to extra resources to continue your learning

🗃️ Lessons

#	Lesson Link	Description	Video	Extra Learning
00	Course Setup	Learn: How to Setup Your Development Environment	Video Coming Soon	Learn More
01	Introduction to Generative AI and LLMs	Learn: Understanding what Generative AI is and how Large Language Models (LLMs) work.	Video	Learn More
02	Exploring and comparing different LLMs	Learn: How to select the right model for your use case	Video	Learn More
03	Using Generative AI Responsibly	Learn: How to build Generative AI Applications responsibly	Video	Learn More
04	Understanding Prompt Engineering Fundamentals	Learn: Hands-on Prompt Engineering Best Practices	Video	Learn More
05	Creating Advanced Prompts	Learn: How to apply prompt engineering techniques that improve the outcome of your prompts.	Video	Learn More
06	Building Text Generation Applications	Build: A text generation app using Azure OpenAI / OpenAI API	Video	Learn More
07	Building Chat Applications	Build: Techniques for efficiently building and integrating chat applications.	Video	Learn More
08	Building Search Apps Vector Databases	Build: A search application that uses Embeddings to search for data.	Video	Learn More
09	Building Image Generation Applications	Build: An image generation application	Video	Learn More
10	Building Low Code AI Applications	Build: A Generative AI application using Low Code tools	Video	Learn More
11	Integrating External Applications with Function Calling	Build: What is function calling and its use cases for applications	Video	Learn More
12	Designing UX for AI Applications	Learn: How to apply UX design principles when developing Generative AI Applications	Video	Learn More
13	Securing Your Generative AI Applications	Learn: The threats and risks to AI systems and methods to secure these systems.	Video	Learn More
14	The Generative AI Application Lifecycle	Learn: The tools and metrics to manage the LLM Lifecycle and LLMOps	Video	Learn More
15	Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Vector Databases	Build: An application using a RAG Framework to retrieve embeddings from a Vector Databases	Video	Learn More
16	Open Source Models and Hugging Face	Build: An application using open source models available on Hugging Face	Video	Learn More
17	AI Agents	Build: An application using an AI Agent Framework	Video	Learn More
18	Fine-Tuning LLMs	Learn: The what, why and how of fine-tuning LLMs	Video	Learn More
19	Building with SLMs	Learn: The benefits of building with Small Language Models	Video Coming Soon	Learn More
20	Building with Mistral Models	Learn: The features and differences of the Mistral Family Models	Video Coming Soon	Learn More
21	Building with Meta Models	Learn: The features and differences of the Meta Family Models	Video Coming Soon	Learn More

🌟 Special thanks

Special thanks to John Aziz for creating all of the GitHub Actions and workflows

Bernhard Merkle for making key contributions to each lesson to improve the learner and code experience.

🎒 Other Courses

Our team produces other courses! Check out:

LangChain

Azure / Edge / MCP / Agents

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Generative AI Series

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Core Learning

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Copilot Series

Getting Help

If you get stuck or have any questions about building AI apps. Join fellow learners and experienced developers in discussions about MCP. It's a supportive community where questions are welcome and knowledge is shared freely.

If you have product feedback or errors while building visit: