How AI Reads and Speaks
Tokens, prediction, training, transformers, and using AI well.
The foundational course. Kids start by typing a sentence and watching it shatter into tokens, end by spotting hallucinations in the wild. Five modules, twenty-eight lessons, every concept earned through play.
"AI doesn’t understand. It calculates."
That's the throughline. Every module reinforces it from a different angle — and every lesson ends with the kid being able to demonstrate it.
5 modules. 28 lessons.
Each module ends with a six-question challenge. Pass five, earn the badge.
AI doesn’t see words. It sees tokens — chunks that may or may not match how humans think.
- 1What’s a token?
- 2Splitting "unbelievable"
- 3Numbers, emojis, weird characters
- 4Why "the" is the most common token
- 5Languages other than English
- ★Challenge: Token Detective
Every word the AI writes is a guess. Some guesses are confident. Some are coin flips. Temperature decides how brave it gets.
- 1What "guess the next word" really means
- 2Confidence: 90% vs 5%
- 3The temperature dial
- 4Top-K and top-P sampling
- 5Why AI repeats itself
- ★Challenge: Probability Pro
How does an AI get good? It practices on billions of sentences and slowly tunes its guesses to be less wrong.
- 1What is "wrong"? Loss explained
- 2Gradient descent as rolling downhill
- 3Train your own tiny network
- 4Overfitting: when it memorizes too well
- 5Why training takes a long time
- ★Challenge: Training Champion
Inside, words become numbers, numbers become positions, and positions pay attention to each other. This is the magic.
- 1Words as points in space
- 2King − Man + Woman = Queen
- 3Attention: who talks to whom?
- 4"The bank" — meaning from context
- 5Layers, layers, layers
- ★Challenge: Inside Engineer
AI is a tool. Tools have edges. This is how to use it well, spot when it lies, and care about what it might break.
- 1What’s a good prompt?
- 2Why AI makes things up (hallucinations)
- 3Whose data trained it? Bias, fairness
- 4When to use AI, when not to
- 5Your AI manifesto
- ★Challenge: Wibbit Wizard