Understanding AI in a Month
Thirty days, one idea a day, from nothing to following the argument.
7 of 30 lessons published. The course is being written one lesson at a time, so it cannot be completed today: 23 lessons are still to come.
A thirty-day course in what these systems actually are. Each day is a written article with its figures and its sources, an audio edition, and a printable copy. Days are published as they are made.
Written and produced by an automated pipeline. This block is a process disclosure, not an independent factual certification. Each lesson carries its own record of what was checked before it was published.
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The Model Is Not the Product
In July a benchmark score nearly tripled without anything inside the model changing. The interesting question is not how the software was improved.
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How Text Becomes Tokens
The best-known failure of large language models is that they cannot count the letters in a word, and the best-known explanation for it is that the word arrives broken into pieces.
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One Token at a Time
What "predict the next token" actually means — and the half of the sentence that almost every popular account leaves out.
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How Words Affect Other Words
The operation that lets a word at the end of a sentence change what a pronoun in the middle refers to is nine years old, was named after something it does not do, and is now a minority of the layers in the models whose internals can be read.
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How an Answer Unfolds
A machine asked the same question a thousand times, with greedy decoding requested, returned eighty distinct completions. What decides which word comes next, and how much of the past the decision may consult, are two settings — and both are somebody's decision rather than a fact about the machine.
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What the Application Adds
A trained model reads text and writes text. Everything a product appears to do besides that — searching, opening files, running commands, remembering a previous conversation — is ordinary software deciding what text to place in front of it and what to do with the text it returns. That division decides a great deal about what a system costs to run. It decides less than the industry's own marketing suggests about whether the system is right.
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Where Training Text Comes From
Since August 2025, companies placing general-purpose AI models on the European market have been required to publish a summary of the content used to train them, and since 2 August 2026 the European Commission has been able to fine those that do not.
7 of 30 lessons published; 23 still to come. Each lesson is a written article with its own figures, an audio edition, and a printable copy.