AI Foundations
What AI actually is, built up from the ground so it genuinely makes sense: the machine it runs on, how it learns, and why it behaves the way it does.
This is where the curriculum starts. The goal of these pages is simple: make AI stop feeling like magic.
We'll build it up in order, like a stack. Where AI came from, the physical machine it runs on, and then the heart of it all: large language models, what they are, how they're built, and what they can and can't do. Each layer rests on the one before it. No prior technical knowledge is assumed.
What we'll cover
How we got here
AI isn't new. The decades of work, the AI winters, and the three things that made this moment.
The hardware behind AI
AI isn't floating in the cloud. It runs on real chips in real buildings.
What a model is
Tokens in, tokens out, and the motor analogy that makes every AI system click.
How a model is built
Trained, not programmed: the steps from blank slate to something you can talk to.
What AI can and can't do
Genuine strengths, real limits, and why AI is sometimes confidently wrong.
What you'll walk away with
This module won't turn you into an engineer, and it doesn't need to. What it will do is let you explain what AI is, use the vocabulary correctly, and hold your own in any conversation about it. That's the foundation everything else in this curriculum builds on.
A note on keeping this current
AI moves faster than any document can. I'll keep this living and breathing as best I can, but there's no way it stays perfectly up to date with where the world is week to week. Think about how much "vibe coding" alone has changed in a year or two: from something people pushed back on, to something reshaping how whole teams build software, with brand new workflows showing up constantly.
So this isn't a news feed. It's the durable building blocks, the parts that don't change much, plus a way of thinking that lets you make sense of whatever comes next. The goal isn't just to learn AI as it is today. It's to learn how to keep learning AI as it moves.
Start with How we got here.