AI Crash Course: AI, ML, LLM and More

Hello! Welcome to the beginning of a new series: AI Crash Course. This is something I’ve been really excited to write because, while AI is quickly becoming a part of many peoples’ everyday lives, it can often feel like a bit of a black box. How does it work? Why does it work—or (perhaps more importantly), why doesn’t it work? What can it do? What tools can we use to work with it? For many folks, our understanding of AI can be fairly surface-level and focused on our experience with it as an end user. This series aims to be an introductory course for anyone interested in learning more about the technical aspects of how AI models work, but feeling (perhaps) a bit intimidated and unsure where to start. If you are a developer who has already been working extensively with building AI agents and skills, this will likely be too low-level for you (but hey, never hurts to refresh on the basics!). However, if you (like many) feel that you might have “missed the on-ramp” or if you’ve been tentativ