You don’t need to know anything about computers, maths or AI to start. Each lesson takes three to five minutes: you press a button, and you watch the machine do the thing. By the end you’ll know exactly what an AI is doing when it writes — and exactly when not to trust it.
Start here
What an AI is actually doing when it answers you, and where it goes wrong. This is a whole course on its own — finish it and you can use one of these things properly. Read it top to bottom; each lesson picks up the one before.
Start this path →- 01Next-token prediction
It writes by guessing the next word. Then it does it again. - 02Rolling the dice
Ask the same thing twice, get two answers. Here’s the dial that decides. - 03Tokens
It never sees letters. It sees chunks of words. - 04The context window
It has no memory. It re-reads the whole chat every single time. - 05Hallucination
It invents facts because invented facts still sound likely. - 06Prompting
Your wording changes the odds. That’s why how you ask matters. - 07Limits
Three things it gets wrong every time, and why you can predict them. - 08Tools
It can’t do math or browse. Other software does that and hands it the answer. - 09Guardrails
The rules are bolted on the outside. That’s why people can pry them off.
Go deeper
What is actually inside the machine: how it learned, how it works out which words matter, and what happens when you make it enormous. Same three-minute lessons, same buttons to press — they just assume you already know the basics.
Start this path →- 10Embeddings
Every word becomes a dot on a map. Close dots mean similar things. - 11Attention
Before every guess, it decides which earlier words matter. - 12Training
Nobody taught it rules. It guessed, missed, and adjusted. Trillions of times. - 13Scale
Same method, much bigger. New skills show up on their own. - 14The assistant act
Answering your questions is a habit that was trained into it later. - 15Thinking out loud
Newer models write out their working first. It genuinely helps. - 16Beyond text
Pictures and sound get chopped into chunks too. Same trick, new senses. - 17The whole picture
Follow one message through all seventeen ideas at once.
Stuck on a word? Every underlined word opens its own definition where you tap it, without losing your place, and the glossary lists all of them. Nothing you type is ever sent anywhere. Teaching this to a room? There is a presenter mode in the lesson map. Keyboard: M map, N next, P previous, G glossary.