AIF-C01 exam preparation

Tactical index of Stephane Maarek’s AIF-C01 course mapped to my atomic notes. Lessons with a wikilink have a note. Pending lessons are marked [ ]. A separate exam-domain index will be created once coverage is complete.

Course: Stephane Maarek — AWS Certified AI Practitioner (Udemy) · Started: October 2025

Legend

Symbol	Meaning
[[wikilink]]	Note exists
- [ ]	Lesson pending — no note yet
#tolab	Hands-on lab pending
🚀	Published on LinkedIn
📆	Scheduled / pending LinkedIn post

Exam Domains

AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) — Exam Domains

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Course Index

Section 1: Artificial Intelligence & Course Introduction

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• History of AI
• Areas of application for AI (use cases)
• Computer Vision
• Natural Language Processing
• Machine Learning (ML)
• Deep Learning (DL)
• Relation between AI, ML, DL and GenAI
• Data Science

Section 2: Code & Slide Download

— No notes —

Section 3: Introduction to AWS & Cloud Computing

— Skipped —

Section 4: Course Cost & Budget Setup

— No notes —

Section 5: Amazon Bedrock and Generative AI (GenAI)

What is Generative AI?

• What is Generative AI (GenAI)?
• Generative Model
• Foundation Model
• Large Language Models (LLM)
• Interacting with LLMs to Generate Content
• Non-Deterministic Nature of LLMs
• Generative AI for Images
• Diffusion Models

Amazon Bedrock Overview

• Amazon Bedrock Overview
• Amazon Bedrock Foundation Models
• Lab Guide: Amazon Bedrock First Steps (EN)
• Lab Guide: Amazon Bedrock First Steps (ES)

Amazon Bedrock Foundation Models

• Criteria for Choosing a Foundation Model
• Amazon Titan Models
• Amazon Bedrock Models — When to Use What

Model Customization & Fine-Tuning

• Model Customization 🚀
• Model Customization with Amazon Bedrock 🚀
• Model Fine-Tuning 🚀
• Supervised Fine-Tuning
• Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
• Model Distillation 🚀
• Continued Pre-Training
• Model Domain Adaptation

Foundation Model Evaluation

• Model Evaluation
• Model Evaluation in Amazon Bedrock
• Automatic Model Evaluation with Amazon Bedrock 🚀
• Benchmark Dataset
• Human-based Model Evaluation with Amazon Bedrock
• Metrics used for Foundation Model Evaluation
• Business Metrics used for Model Evaluation

RAG & Knowledge Bases

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) 📆
• RAG and Knowledge Bases with Amazon Bedrock 📆
• Vector Databases in Amazon Bedrock 📆

Hands-On (no notes): Demo of “chat with your document” in Bedrock using a simulated KB. Model only answers from the document — irrelevant questions get no answer. #tolab Create and document my own demo. #tolab Full KB setup with Pinecone (free) and other AWS-native vector DBs.

More GenAI Concepts

• Tokenization
• Context Window
• Embeddings

Guardrails

• GuardRails in Amazon Bedrock

Hands-On (no notes): Created a Guardrail with topic denial (cooking recipes) and PII filter (email masking). Validated with prompts. #tolab Replicate this setup.

Agents

• AI Agent
• Agents for Amazon Bedrock
• Agent Loop
• Chain of Thought (CoT) Prompting

Monitoring & Pricing

• Amazon Bedrock & CloudWatch
• Amazon Bedrock Pricing
• Amazon Bedrock — Cost & Tradeoffs Cheatsheet

Amazon Nova

• Amazon Nova Models
• Amazon Nova 2 Models

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Section 6: Prompt Engineering

What is Prompt Engineering?

• Prompt Engineering
• Negative Prompting

Prompt Performance Optimization

• System Prompts
• Inference Parameters
• Prompt Latency

Prompt Engineering Techniques

• Zero-Shot Prompting
• Few-Shots Prompting
• Chain of Thought (CoT) Prompting
• Single-Shot Prompting
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• RAG vs. Fine-Tuning

Prompt Templates

• Prompt Templates

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Section 7: Amazon Q Deep Dive

Amazon Q Business

• Amazon Q Business Introduction
• Amazon Q Business Data Connectors
• Amazon Q Business Plugins
• Amazon Q Business Authentication
• Amazon Q Business: Anonymous vs. Authenticated Access
• Amazon Q Business Admin Controls

Hands-On (no notes): Amazon Q Business chat demo with Anonymous Access and S3 connector.

Amazon Q Apps

• Amazon Q Apps Introduction

Amazon Q Developer

• Amazon Q Developer

Amazon Q for AWS Services

• Amazon Q for QuickSight
• Amazon Q for EC2
• Amazon Q for AWS Chatbot
• Amazon Q for Glue
• Amazon Q for Amazon Connect

PartyRock

• PartyRock — Amazon Bedrock Playground

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Section 8: Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

AI, ML, Deep Learning & GenAI

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• AI Model
• AI Model vs. Algorithm
• Machine Learning (ML)
• Deep Learning (DL)
• Neural Networks
• Generative AI (GenAI)
• Transformer Architecture
• Transformer Architecture Components
• Diffusion Models
• Multimodal Foundation Models
• AWS ML Computing Infrastructure

ML Terms You May Encounter in the Exam

• GPT — Generative Pre-Trained Transformer
• BERT — Bidirectional Encoder Representations
• RNN — Recurrent Neural Network
• ResNet — Residual Network
• SVM — Support Vector Machine
• WaveNet — Audio Synthesis
• GAN — Generative Adversarial Network
• XGBoost — Extreme Gradient Boosting

Training Data & Data Preparation

• Training Data
• Data Preparation
• Data Types and Formats in AI

Supervised Learning

• Supervised Learning
• Regression
• Classification
  • Training vs. Validation vs. Test Set
• Feature Engineering

Unsupervised Learning

• Unsupervised Learning
• Clustering Technique
• Association Rule Learning
• Anomaly Detection Technique
• Semi-Supervised Learning

Self-Supervised Learning

• Self-Supervised Learning

Reinforcement Learning

• Reinforcement Learning (RL)
• RLHF — Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Pending — Section 8

• Model Fit, Bias, and Variance
• Model Evaluation Metrics
• Machine Learning — Inferencing
  • Types of Inferencing
• Phases of a Machine Learning Project
• Hyperparameters
• When is ML not appropriate?
• Amazon SageMaker Overview
• Amazon SageMaker Feature Store

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Study Log

• Picked it up again in October 2025 with the goal of getting certified by January 2026.
• Feb 9: Taking too long. Better to take notes as I go and connect them later.
• Limit notes to what Maarek covers — he knows what the exam needs.