level-4-professional/README.md

Level 4 — Professional

You are: a systems designer. You will become: a practitioner — leading an AI team, doing custom model training, applied alignment, safety engineering, red-teaming. Comfortable with training-stack internals. Typical time: 6–12 months.

Prerequisites

• Level 3 exit criteria met
• Software engineering background (any stack)
• Access to compute for training runs (cloud GPUs at minimum)
• Willingness to read papers

Exit criteria

• You've fine-tuned a model with measurable impact
• You've led a red-team exercise
• You understand training-stack internals (attention, MoE, quantization, inference optimization)
• You can teach any Level 1–3 concept clearly
• You can lead an AI team or an AI initiative
• For companies: applied research team stood up, safety program mature, cross-industry benchmarking

Tracks

• individual/ — 12 practitioner modules
• company/ — 8 modules for mature AI organizations
• shared/ — training/safety/card templates
• eli10/ — plain-language companions

How to work Level 4

1. Deepen training-stack understanding (02) — you can't lead what you don't understand
2. Do a real fine-tuning project (03)
3. Build safety engineering discipline (05, 06)
4. Master evaluation (07)
5. Teach the material (11) — teaching forces mastery
6. Everything else is depth on the specialty you're pursuing

If you finish this level, you can lead an AI team or run an initiative.