An interactive series · read free, in your browser
How a machine comes to know things, hand them on, and finally answer you: Part 1 teaches itself from raw text and pixels, Part 2 pours what a giant knows into a pocket-sized copy, Part 3 turns an autocomplete into an assistant with sixteen perfect answers. Every demo on every page is real computation running live in your browser — never a canned animation.
No teacher. No answer key. Hide part of the world, guess what's missing, check yourself — the trick behind GPT, CLIP, and every modern foundation model. Four live demos, including a real InfoNCE contrastive-learning playground you can watch collapse and recover.
Part 2A trained giant knows more than its final answers show. Distillation pours that hidden knowledge into a model small enough for your pocket — and, strangest of all, a model can pour it into itself. Watch two students learn from the same teacher live, and a machine copy itself until the page goes blank.
Part 3A freshly trained model has read everything and answers nothing — ask it a question and it just keeps typing. A real language model lives in this page: quiz it, fine-tune it live on a sixteen-line copybook, catch it inventing facts about animals that don't exist, and measure exactly what the fix costs.
Companion pageWhat comes after the copybook: no answer key at all — just actions, consequences, and a score that arrives late. Slot machines, a live Q-learning maze, and the RLHF pipeline that finishes every modern assistant. Hosted on its own page, same dials.