Everything that happened. Where we are now. What it means.
The full story of artificial intelligence, from its origins to the frontier, told for anyone trying to understand the world they’re living in.
The course · 12 modules
- 00Prologuea machine nobody can fully explain
- 01The Machineeverything starts with on and off
- 02Can Machines Think?could a machine ever think?
- 03The Long Winterthe big promises that fell apart
- 04Learning from Datateaching by example instead of rules
- 05Going Deepermore layers, more it can notice
- 06The Meaning of Wordsturning words into numbers
- 07Paying Attentionlearning what to focus on
- 08The Model in the Machinewhere the answers actually come from
- 09Talking to the Modelwhat happens when you hit send
- 10Agentswhen it starts doing things for you
- 11Epiloguewhat none of this settles
Alongside
Optional. Each one stands on its own, in any order, or not at all.
- 12The Sommelierwatch a machine learn from its own mistakes
- 13The Amnesiac Oraclefollow a message to an LLM and back
- 14Prompt Cachingreuse work from an unchanged prompt[soon][soon]
- 15Model Context Protocol (MCP)connect a model to the world outside[soon][soon]
History, machinery, meaning
This is a history of AI. From the first ideas about thinking machines to where things stand today.
Along the way, it explains how these systems actually work, in plain language, and why they were built the way they were. Not just the how, but the reasoning behind it.
And it asks a bigger question. What does any of this mean? For the world, and for what we understand about our own minds.
No technical background needed. Just curiosity. Everything gets explained as it comes up, in the order that makes it make sense.
The whole story, from the start.