For complete beginners

AI 101

No math and no jargon. Short lessons that take you from "what is AI" to how agents work, written for people who make decisions, not people who write code.

Tap a lesson to open it. New lessons are added here as I write them.

The basicsSix lessons, about two minutes each

01What AI actually isPatterns, not rules

Normal software follows rules a person wrote. AI learns patterns from examples instead. Show it a million photos of cats and it learns what a cat looks like without anyone defining one.

Think of a new analyst who reads every past deal memo until they can spot a good deal on their own.

02How a chatbot writesOne word at a time

A large language model reads a huge amount of text and learns to predict the next word. It writes by making that guess over and over. That is why it can sound confident and still be wrong.

It is fluent autocomplete trained on most of the internet.

03Prompts and contextIt only knows what you tell it

The model has no memory of your company, your goals or your last conversation unless you put them in front of it. Better context beats clever wording almost every time.

Brief it like a smart intern on day one.

04From chatbot to agentWhen AI starts taking actions

Give a model tools, like web search, a calendar or the ability to run code, and a goal. Now it can plan steps, use the tools and check its own work. That is an agent.

A chatbot drafts the email. An agent finds the time, writes the invite and sends it.

05Why AI costs what it costsChips, power and money

Every answer runs on specialized chips in data centers that draw enormous amounts of electricity. Compute, capital and energy set the limits on what gets built, which is what I track on AI Radar.

The bottleneck is rarely the idea. It is who controls the scarce input.

06Where AI breaksWrong answers and empty seats

Models make things up when they lack context. The bigger failure is human. In my research, companies bought AI at the top and the people doing the work never used it.

Good AI products are designed around how people actually work.

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