NVIDIAAssociateNCA-GENL
NVIDIA-Certified Associate: Generative AI LLMs
Entry-level credential for the basics of building, connecting and maintaining apps that use large language models, with NVIDIA tools.
- Issuer
- NVIDIA
- Level
- Associate
- Exam code
- NCA-GENL
- Exam format
- 50–60 multiple-choice questions · 1 hour
- Valid for
- 2 years
- Focus
- Building generative AI apps
- Who it is for
- People starting out with generative AI and LLMs who have a basic grasp of machine learning.
- Before you start
- Familiarity with the fundamentals of machine learning, such as feature engineering, model comparison and cross validation.
What the exam covers
Listed as the issuer lists them, with weights where the issuer publishes them.
- Core machine learning and AI knowledge (30%)
- Data analysis (14%)
- Experimentation (22%)
- Software development (24%)
- Trustworthy AI (10%)
Key terms to know
Words from this certification's topic areas, in plain English. Know these and the study material will be much easier to follow.
- Transformer
- The model design behind most modern language models. It uses attention to relate words to each other.
- Attention
- How a transformer decides which parts of the input matter for each word it handles.
- Token
- A small chunk of text, often part of a word. Models read and are billed by tokens.
- Prompt engineering
- Writing instructions so a model gives better answers.
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- Looking up relevant documents first, then giving them to the model to answer from.
- Fine-tuning
- Training an existing model further on your own examples.
- RLHF
- Reinforcement learning from human feedback: people rate answers to teach the model what is helpful.
- Hallucination
- When a model states something false in a confident way.
- Bias
- Unfair skew in a model's results, often caused by skewed training data.
- Responsible AI
- Building and using AI fairly, safely, transparently and with accountability.
- CUDA
- NVIDIA's software layer for running programs on its GPUs.
- TensorRT
- An NVIDIA tool that makes trained models run faster.
Build the knowledge here
Our lessons are not exam prep for this certification, but they cover the same ground.
Details last checked Oct 7, 2026 against the issuer's own pages. Exams, versions and rules change. Confirm on the official page before you book. We are not affiliated with NVIDIA.