Course
How a model learns
Work out what an AI system is actually doing, and what that makes it good and bad at.
The shape of it
7 lessons
About 25 minutes in total. Your progress is kept on this device — no account, nothing sent anywhere.
Course complete
Put your name on it and print it, or save it as a PDF. Nothing is sent anywhere.
The lessons
Prediction, not knowledge
State what a language model computes when you ask it something.
7 steps · about 4 min
Everything becomes numbers
Predict what a model can and cannot see in your words.
7 steps · about 4 min
Learning is error, made smaller
Trace one training step from a wrong guess to a better one.
7 steps · about 4 min
The data is the teacher
Predict a model's blind spots from what it was trained on.
7 steps · about 4 min
Why it invents things
Explain confident nonsense as a property of prediction, not a bug.
7 steps · about 4 min
What bigger buys
Say what scale improves and what it leaves untouched.
7 steps · about 4 min
Knowing what it cannot know
Decide when a model's answer needs checking against the world.
7 steps · about 4 min