Curious track
AI, explained without code
For anyone who uses ChatGPT or Claude and wants to understand what's underneath — no programming needed. Read the posts in order; open each term to check yourself with its quiz.
Curious · No hands-on yet
0 of 12 done · about 1.4 h totalStart: Breaking into AI engineering: a roadmap from zero
- Read · 7 minBreaking into AI engineering: a roadmap from zeroThe job explained through one wrong answer, then a level-by-level ladder with honest time estimates, a learning order and five things to read.
- Read · 6 minWhat happens when you ask an AI a questionFrom pressing enter to the last word: tokens, the desk the model reads from, one-token-at-a-time writing, thinking, web search, and where your words go.
- Learn a term · quiz · ~8 minLarge Language Model (LLM)A transformer trained to predict the next token over trillions of tokens, then tuned to follow instructions: the engine under chat, agents and RAG.
- Learn a term · quiz · ~8 minTokenThe unit an LLM reads and writes: a word or word fragment. Context limits, latency and price are all metered in tokens, not characters.
- Learn a term · quiz · ~8 minHallucinationWhen an LLM states something fluent and confident that is false or not supported by its sources.
- Read · 6 minRAG in plain English: letting the AI look it upWhy a model that sounds like it knows everything still needs to check, and how retrieval-augmented generation makes it read before it answers.
- Learn a term · quiz · ~8 minEmbeddingA list of numbers (a vector) that represents the meaning of a text, so that similar meanings end up close together.
- Learn a term · quiz · ~8 minRetrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)Retrieval-augmented generation: fetch relevant documents for a question, put them in the prompt, and have the LLM answer from them with citations.
- Read · 4 minWhat is an AI agent, really?A chatbot tells you how; an AI agent goes and does it, deciding each next step from what it just found. A plain-English tour of the loop, the tools, and why limits are part of the design.
- Learn a term · quiz · ~8 minAI agentA system where the LLM directs its own steps and tool calls in a loop until the goal is met or a stop condition fires (Anthropic, Dec 2024).
- Read · 6 minHow do you know if an AI is any good?Why a great demo proves very little, how teams check an AI system with a fixed set of test questions called a golden set, and how much a score from 40 questions is really worth.
- Learn a term · quiz · ~8 minGolden setA fixed, versioned set of realistic inputs with known-good answers or relevant documents, used to score every change the same way.