Welcome

This course begins with a reply to a client: clear, friendly and with its clause cited. The clause does not exist. In four blocks you will go down, layer by layer, into what happens inside a language model until you can explain how that sentence was written and what check would have caught it. Keep your AI assistant and your logbook at hand: here you practise with it, and you check it.

What you will find

• Block 1. From text to numbers: tokens and meaning. How a text is chopped into tokens and how each piece becomes a point on a map where being close means resembling, not being identical. How much fits and how much a conversation costs. First reading of the case: what the assistant really read.
• Block 2. Attention: how the model uses what it has in front of it. Attention, the piece that sets current models apart: each word distributes weight among the others to fix its meaning, layer after layer. And its practical consequence, the context window. Second reading of the case: what the assistant attended to and what it did not have in front of it.
• Block 3. Training and adapting: what it learned, from where and up to when. How a model is trained on texts that correct themselves, whose those texts were and how a base model becomes an assistant. Third reading of the case: what the assistant had learned about policies before reading any.
• Block 4. Generating: why it answers this way and why it sometimes makes things up. The model writes by choosing one word at a time, and from that mechanism come the variety of its answers and its inventions. Last reading of the case: how the clause was written and what check would have caught it.

How you will work

Each lesson opens with a short introduction and, below it, several pills: short pieces that explain a single idea and end with a case or something to do. Read them in order the first time; afterwards you can go back to the one you need.

Where you see an interactive practice, do it before reading on: it is there for you to decide, calculate or classify, and the explanation comes afterwards. It does not save what you write, so copy whatever you want to keep.

Each block ends with an exam of six questions. All the answers come with a comment, including the wrong ones: failing and reading why is part of the method.

At The Singular Academy you learn by solving real cases. If at the end of a lesson you do not know what you would do differently tomorrow, go back over it.