How to create your own LLM knowledge bases today (full course):

If you're able to learn how to create an LLM knowledge base then you have essentially created your own "external brain" that you can utilise, on top of that, this could change how you run your business, your content, your network, your life, it can all be run through your own personalised external brains that you have access to. In fact, there's probably a market for creating this for local businesses in your community if you're able to connect to them and showcase them the value in creating an external brain for their entire business. What happened? Andrej Karpathy happened and showcased how he is using LLM knowledge bases which essentially work as external brains... So, I wanted to showcase this system in this complete guide, step by step, so I had some back and fourths with my mate claude and we decided that we'd chat through 3 versions to create LLM knowledge bases, here they are... Pick your version: Complete beginner > Click CTRL F and type: "YOUR FIRST KNOWLEDGE BASE" Comfortable with AI tools > Click CTRL F and type: "THE FULL SYSTEM" and read it up to automation. Builder / developer > Click CTRL F and type "THE FULL SYSTEM" and read it all the way through. Before you do that ask yourself if you want to do this and read this: Most people use AI like a search engine with amnesia. You ask a question, get an answer, close the tab. Tomorrow you start from scratch. Nothing accumulates. Nothing compounds. You're burning tokens to rediscover the same context over and over again. Karpathy's system flips this completely: You collect raw material. Articles, papers, YouTube transcripts, PDFs, anything related to a topic you care about The AI reads everything and writes a structured wiki. Summaries, concept explanations, connections between ideas, a master index You ask questions against the wiki. It researches across its own compiled knowledge and gives you cited, synthesised answers Every answer gets filed back into the wiki. So the next question benefits from all previous work The AI periodically health-checks the wiki. Finding contradictions, gaps, outdated information, and fixing them The result? A personal knowledge base that gets smarter every time you touch it. After a month of feeding it, you have a deeply interlinked resource that no Google search could replicate. Because it's been synthesised, not just indexed. This works for literally any topic. Crypto markets. Medical research. Legal case law. Competitive intelligence. Academic study. Philosophy. If you want to accumulate and connect knowledge over time, this is the system. 1: YOUR FIRST KNOWLEDGE BASE: Zero tekkerzzz are required here (tekkerzzz is like British slang for a baller, which is British slang for someone who has skill with a football, which actually just means you got skills, I could have just said zero skills but that's not me, so zero tekkerzzz it is init)... If you can install an app and copy-paste text, you can do this right now. What you need Obsidian (free). A note-taking app that works with plain text files. Download from obsidian.md. Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android. A Claude subscription ($20/month Pro at claude.ai). Or any AI chatbot you prefer: ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever. That's it. Step 1: Create your vault (2 minutes) Open Obsidian. It'll ask you to create or open a "vault." A vault is just a folder on your computer where your notes live. Click "Create new vault" Name it something descriptive (e.g. "crypto-research" or "health-knowledge") Choose where to save it (Documents folder is fine) Click "Create" You now have an empty vault. Obsidian watches this folder. Any markdown file you put inside will appear as a note automatically. Step 2: Create two folders (1 minute) In Obsidian's left sidebar, right-click and select "New folder". Create these two: raw for your source material (articles, notes, anything you collect) wiki for where the AI will build your compiled knowledge base That's your entire starting structure. Step 3: Add your first raw sources (5 minutes) Pick a topic you're genuinely interested in. Find 3 to 5 good articles about it. For each one: In Obsidian, right-click the raw folder > "New note" Give it a descriptive name (e.g. "bitcoin-halving-2024-explainer") Copy-paste the article text into the note At the very top, add a line like: Source: [paste the URL here] Don't overthink the formatting. Don't stress about structure. Just get the raw text in there. Quick win: Install the Obsidian Web Clipper browser extension (free, Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Edge). It saves web pages directly into your vault as formatted markdown notes with one click. But for your first go, copy-paste is perfectly fine. Step 4: Ask the AI to compile your wiki (5 minutes) Open Claude (or your preferred AI). Copy and paste this prompt, replacing the bracketed sections: Claude will produce structured output. Copy each section into a new note inside your wiki folder: Save the summaries as individual notes (e.g. wiki/summary-bitcoin-halving.