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Cutting EdgeHardcore DevelopersShu-Ha-Ri Method

Teach Your AI What Humans Want

The RLHF Post-Training Stack™ — Build the Alignment Layer Behind Every Frontier Model

Pretraining gives a model knowledge. RLHF gives it judgment. Master the post-training layer that turned raw language models into assistants people actually trust.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback is how a capable-but-unruly base model becomes a helpful, harmless, honest assistant. It's the technique that made ChatGPT feel different—and the post-training layer every frontier lab now depends on. This masterclass takes you inside RLHF from first principles: why it emerged to solve hard-to-specify problems, how to collect and model human preferences, how to train reward models, and how to optimize policies with the full post-training toolkit. You'll work through preference data, reward modeling, policy optimization, synthetic data generation, and modern alternatives like DPO—then wire it all into a working post-training pipeline. This is the deep, build-it-yourself companion to alignment: not the philosophy of alignment, but the machinery that produces it.

FROM
API Consumer
$100K-$150K · Replaceable Skills
TO
Model Builder
$250K-$400K · Irreplaceable
9 weeks · 50 hours · Own your model weights forever
Why It's a Masterclass, Not a Course

AI Hyper-Personalizes Your Experience

This isn't a one-size-fits-all course. It's assessed to your gaps, adapted to you, and finished with a custom deliverable you build and own.

01Before You Start

Pre-Masterclass Assessment

You begin with an AI-driven assessment that maps what you already know against everything this masterclass covers. We pinpoint your knowledge gaps up front—so your time goes only where it moves the needle.

02During

An AI-Personalized Path

Your results reshape the masterclass around you. The AI aligns the material, examples, and pace to close your specific gaps—so a fixed curriculum becomes a path built for exactly one person: you.

03Your Outcome

A Custom Deliverable You Own

You don't leave with a certificate—you leave with a real, working artifact built for your goals. In "Teach Your AI What Humans Want," that means a deliverable you can ship, show, and build on. Something you made, not just something you watched.

Proven Transformation Results

Real outcomes from students who completed The LLM Sovereignty Stack™ and built their competitive moats

📈 Career Transformation

75%
Promoted to Senior+ within 12 months
$80K-$150K
Average salary increase
90%
Report being 'irreplaceable' at their company
85%
Lead AI initiatives after completion

💰 Business Impact

$150K/year
Average API cost savings from owning model weights
70%
Eliminate third-party model dependencies entirely
60%
Raise funding citing proprietary technology as moat
3-6 months
Average time to ROI on course investment

What You'll Actually Build

🏗️
Complete GPT
4,000+ lines of PyTorch
🧠
Attention
From scratch, no libraries
📊
Training
100M+ tokens
🎯
Classification
95%+ accuracy
💬
ChatBot
Instruction-following

Choose Your Path to Mastery

All modalities include the complete LLM Sovereignty Stack™. Choose based on your learning style and goals.

Self-Paced Mastery

$1,497
Lifetime Access
Self-directed learners
  • All 9 modules available immediately
  • Lifetime access to content and updates
  • Community support and code reviews
  • Monthly live office hours
Most Popular

9-Week Live Cohort

$5,997
12 Weeks
Engineers wanting accountability
  • Weekly live workshops with Dr. Lee
  • Pipeline reviews on your models
  • Direct instructor access
  • Graduation certificate
  • Alumni network access

Founder's Edition

$17,997
6 Months
Founders & technical leaders
  • One-on-one mentorship with Dr. Lee
  • Post-training strategy for YOUR model
  • Custom reward-model design
  • 90-day satisfaction guarantee

5-Day Immersive Bootcamp

Executive intensive format. Build an RLHF pipeline in one week. Live reward-modeling labs.

Course Curriculum

9 transformative steps · 40 hours of hands-on content

1

Module 1: Why RLHF Exists

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • The Hard-to-Specify Problem: When You Can't Write the Reward
  • From Base Model to Assistant: The Post-Training Layer
  • How RLHF Changed What AI Feels Like
  • The RLHF Pipeline at a Glance
  • Your Post-Training Roadmap
2

Module 2: Human Preferences as Data

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • What Counts as a Preference: Pairwise, Ranked, and Rated
  • Designing Preference Collection That Isn't Noise
  • Annotator Guidelines and Inter-Rater Reliability
  • Preference Data Quality Gates
  • Hands-On: Build a Preference Dataset
3

Module 3: Reward Modeling

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • Turning Preferences into a Scalar Reward
  • Training a Reward Model from Pairwise Data
  • Reward Model Evaluation and Calibration
  • Reward Hacking: How Models Game the Signal
  • Hands-On: Train Your First Reward Model
4

Module 4: Policy Optimization Foundations

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • RL for Language Models: The Core Loop
  • PPO and the Post-Training Objective
  • KL Penalties: Staying Close to the Base Model
  • Stability Techniques for RL Fine-Tuning
  • Hands-On: Optimize a Policy Against Your Reward Model
5

Module 5: Direct Preference Optimization

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • DPO: Skipping the Reward Model
  • When DPO Beats Full RLHF—and When It Doesn't
  • Implementing DPO End to End
  • Comparing DPO and PPO Head to Head
  • Hands-On: Align a Model with DPO
6

Module 6: Synthetic Data for Feedback

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • Scaling Beyond Human Labels with Synthetic Data
  • AI Feedback: RLAIF and Constitutional Approaches
  • Quality Control for Synthetic Preferences
  • Blending Human and Synthetic Signal
  • Hands-On: Generate and Validate Synthetic Preferences
7

Module 7: Instruction & Post-Training Recipes

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • Supervised Fine-Tuning as the Foundation
  • Sequencing SFT, Reward Modeling, and RL
  • Post-Training Recipes Used by Frontier Labs
  • Ablations: Knowing Which Step Did What
  • Hands-On: Run a Full SFT-to-RLHF Sequence
8

Module 8: Safety in the Loop

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • Safety Regressions at Every Post-Training Step
  • Red Teaming the Aligned Model
  • Measuring Helpfulness vs Harmlessness Tradeoffs
  • Guardrails Against Alignment Regressions
  • Hands-On: Add Safety Regressions to Your Pipeline
9

Module 9: The Complete Post-Training Pipeline

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • Assembling Preferences, Reward, Policy, and Safety
  • Evaluating the Aligned Model End to End
  • Deploying and Monitoring an RLHF'd Model
  • Timeless Practices as Methods Evolve
  • Capstone: Ship a Working RLHF Pipeline

Production-Grade Tech Stack

Master the same tools used by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to build frontier AI systems

PyTorchHugging Face TRLTransformersReward ModelsDPOPPOWeights & Biases

Frequently Asked Questions

How is this different from AI Alignment and RLHF?

AI Alignment and RLHF is the broad alignment course—DPO, constitutional AI, and the theory of building models that do what you want. This masterclass is a deep, hands-on build of the RLHF post-training pipeline specifically: preference data, reward modeling, policy optimization, synthetic feedback, and safety regressions. Think of it as the machine-room companion to the alignment course.

Do I need to have trained a model before?

You should be comfortable with PyTorch and fine-tuning. If you've taken Build Your Own LLM or Fine-Tune Your Own Models, you're well prepared. RLHF sits on top of a base or instruction-tuned model, which you'll start from.

Is RLHF still relevant with DPO around?

Yes—and you'll learn both. DPO simplifies parts of the pipeline but doesn't replace understanding reward modeling and policy optimization. You'll implement both and learn exactly when each wins.

Stop Renting AI. Start Owning It.

Join 500+ engineers and founders who've gone from API consumers to model builders—building their competitive moats one step at a time.

Command $250K-$400K salaries or save $100K-$500K in annual API costs. Own your model weights. Build defensible technology moats. Become irreplaceable.

Starting at
$1,497

Self-paced · Lifetime access · 30-day guarantee

Start Your Transformation

This is not just education. This is technological sovereignty.

30-day guarantee
Lifetime updates
Zero API costs forever