Learn the True Basics of Artificial Intelligence

About this course

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence. Video/audio creation tools have been used to generate artificial speech meant to emulate human instruction.

You use AI every day, whether you notice it or not. It sorts your email, suggests the next word in your texts, recommends what to watch, and now answers questions in tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Most people, though, have never been shown how any of it actually works. This course fixes that.

We built this course for people who are curious about AI but don’t have a technical background. You don’t need to know how to code, and you don’t need to be good at math. If you can follow a good analogy and you’re willing to ask “but how does that work?”, you have everything you need. Our goal is simple: by the end, you should be able to explain how modern AI works to a friend or coworker, in your own words, without hand-waving.

Where AI came from

We start by defining what a large language model actually is and how it differs from the traditional software you’re used to. Regular programs follow rules that a person wrote. Language models learn patterns from enormous amounts of text. That one difference explains a lot about why AI can be so impressive and, at times, so confidently wrong.

From there, we walk through the 70-year history that led to today’s tools. You’ll meet Alan Turing and his famous test, see why early rule-based AI hit a wall, and learn how machine learning changed the field by letting computers learn from examples instead. We cover the 2012 deep learning breakthrough, the 2017 research paper that introduced the transformer, and the jump to models like BERT, GPT-3, and eventually ChatGPT. We also look at the companies shaping AI today, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and xAI, and at what sets each of them apart.

Why data matters so muchAI is only as good as the data it learns from.

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