Free Course · 8 Lessons

How AI Actually Works

Not the marketing version. Not the academic version. The real mechanics of artificial intelligence — explained clearly, with history, animations, and honest uncertainty about what we don't know.

Start from the beginning

This course takes you from "what even is a model?" to the genuine open questions that keep AI researchers up at night. Each lesson builds on the last, but you can jump to any topic that interests you. There are CSS animations to show concepts in motion, embedded videos from the best explainers in the field, and comprehension checks to make sure things actually land.

Lessons

Lesson 1

What Is a "Model"?

Is it a file? On a hard drive? How big? What are the numbers inside it, and what do they represent?

12 min read
Lesson 2

How Neural Networks Think

Neurons, layers, and the forward pass. What actually happens when data goes in and a prediction comes out.

15 min read
Lesson 3

Training: Teaching Machines

Gradient descent, backpropagation, and the breakthrough papers that were rejected four separate times.

15 min read
Lesson 4

Data: The Secret Ingredient

How Amazon reviews accidentally bootstrapped a field. ImageNet, bias, and the humans behind the labels.

12 min read
Lesson 5

Transformers & Attention

The architecture that changed everything. Eight Google researchers, a Beatles reference, and 173,000 citations.

15 min read
Lesson 6

From Model to Product

How ChatGPT actually works. RLHF, inference, temperature, and AlphaGo's Move 37.

14 min read
Lesson 7

The Hardware Story

From a Denny's booth to $5 trillion. GPUs, data centers the size of Central Park, and the chip wars.

14 min read
Lesson 8

What We Don't Know

The black box problem, the consciousness question, and where even the experts genuinely disagree.

15 min read