Notes on AI

Notes on AI

A 92-episode curriculum explaining AI — from tokens to agents. 20 episodes published.

Act 1Mental Models: What AI Is

What is AI

Why Generative AI Feels Different

How AI Thinks

Why GenAI Advanced All at Once

What Is a Model, Really?

Training vs Using a Model

What AI Receives When You Send a Prompt

Is AI a Student or an Actor

What AI Is Good At vs Bad At

The 5-Sentence Mental Model of GenAI

Act 2Behavior & Limits: Why AI Feels Weird

Tokens

Tokenization

Why Typos Don't Matter

Context Window

Context Engineering

Why Long Chats Drift

"Forgetting" vs "Never Knew"

The Chat Is Not a Democracy

Why AI Sounds Confident

Why Long Chats Get Confused

E021Grounding: Answer Only From My Text

E022Synthesis: How to Keep AI Sharp

E023Asking for Assumptions

E024Output Formats

E025Quick Verification Habits

E026Mini-Synthesis: The Trust Ladder

Act 3Steering & Trust: Becoming AI-Literate

E027The 3-Part Prompt

E028Few-Shot Prompting

E029Stepwise Prompting

E030“Critique Then Rewrite”

E031“Ask Me Questions First”

E032Tone Control Without Cringe

E033What Hallucinations Are

E034When You Should Trust AI

E035Red Flags

E036Calibration

E037Asking for Sources

E038Contradictions

E039**Prompt Injection**

E040Verification in 30 Seconds

E041Reliability vs Creativity

E042Synthesis: From Brainstorming to Decisions

Act 4Training & Knowledge: Where Behavior Comes From

E043Training vs Usage Revisited

E044Pretraining

E045Instruction Tuning

E046Preference Training

E047Fine-Tuning

E048Knowledge Cutoff

E049Memorization vs Generalization

E050Overfitting

E051Benchmarks

E052Synthesis: The Training Pipeline

E053Why Models Don’t Know Your Company

E054**Agents Explained Conceptually**

E055Tools vs Models

E056Memory Illusions

E057Mini-Synthesis: Knowledge vs Behavior

Act 5Constraints & Risk: Cost, Speed, Privacy

E058Input vs Output Tokens

E059Why System Prompts Cost Too

E060Context Is Expensive

E061Cost Hygiene

E062Small vs Big Models

E063Speed, Quality, Cost Triangle

E064Rate Limits

E065Caching

E066Free Trial Economics

E067Sensitive Data

E068Personal vs Business Data

E069Do Not Paste Secrets

E070Data Retention

E071Consumer vs Enterprise AI

E072Prompt Injection Revisited

E073Redaction

E074Synthesis: AI Safety Policy

Act 6Beyond Chat: Multimodal & Knowledge Systems

E075Vision Models

E076OCR vs Vision Reasoning

E077Image Generation Basics

E078Inpainting

E079Deepfakes 101

E080Speech-to-Text

E081Text-to-Speech

E082Multimodal Prompting

E083Why Chatbots Forget Revisited

E084Embeddings Explained

E085Chunking

E086Vector Databases

E087Retrieval vs Generation

E088Reranking

E089Citations

E090Freshness Without Retraining

E091Evaluating RAG

E092Synthesis: Build a Knowledge Assistant