What’s New

Notable changes for the current cohort. Older changes are folded into the curriculum.

2026

Course structure

• The open-source LLMs module from previous cohorts has been removed.
• Evaluation and monitoring, which used to be one module, are now two separate modules. Module 3 (Evaluation) focuses on offline metrics for retrieval and for the full RAG flow; Module 4 (Monitoring) focuses on online metrics for a deployed system.
• The orchestration module from previous cohorts has been removed. The 2026 cohort focuses on RAG fundamentals; orchestration may return in a future cohort.

Tooling

• Phoenix (open source, from Arize) replaces Grafana for monitoring.
• Quadrant joins as a sponsor and is the vector database for the vector-search module.

Sponsors

• Arize: monitoring platform; provides Phoenix.
• dlthub: ingestion library; runs a workshop on data ingestion for LLMs.
• Quadrant: vector database; appears throughout the vector-search module. New sponsor for this cohort.

What stayed

• The course is still about RAG. It is still hands-on. It still does not require GPUs and can be completed on a normal laptop with a few dollars of OpenAI credit (or zero dollars on Groq).
• Best practices module is still taught by Timur and may pick up some new techniques.
• A competition is planned again, similar in spirit to last year’s math-problem challenge but with a different format.

What will likely change next year

• Some agent or agentic-search content, once tooling stabilises. The same wait-and-see approach was used before launching the original LLM Zoomcamp.

For the full curriculum, see Curriculum. For environment setup, see Environment Setup.