Practice the call before it counts.
One hand at the Table a day, twelve short lessons, and toys that show how AI works by letting you move it. No account, and nothing here costs anything to get wrong.
This week: Keep a person in itDecide which steps a tool takes alone and which wait for a look.
This week's thread
A lesson, a shift and a project that lean on Keep a person in it. Take any, or none.
Twelve lessons
Each one is a live page that shows one idea inside an AI. Start with work.
Using AI at work0 of 7 explored
- The context windowAI can only see a set amount of text at once. In a long chat, the oldest parts quietly fall out of view.
- RetrievalBefore answering, the system looks up the most relevant bits of your documents and hands them to the AI along with your question.
- Prompt injectionText inside an email, web page or file can trick an AI into treating it as an order, as if you had written it.
- EvalsBefore you swap one prompt or tool for another, test both on the same set of real examples and score them the same way.
- Picking the next tokenAI writes one chunk at a time by guessing what comes next, with a dial for how safe or adventurous each guess is.
- TokensAI does not read letters or whole words. It reads chunks, and the chunks it knows came from what it read most.
- Precision and recallAny system that flags things has to choose between catching everything and only flagging what is truly a match.
How it is built0 of 5 explored
- EmbeddingsAI turns words into lists of numbers, so words that mean similar things end up pointing the same way.
- AttentionWhen reading a sentence, each word looks back at the other words and decides which ones matter most for its meaning.
- Underfitting and overfittingA model can be too simple to see the pattern, or so eager that it memorizes every quirk and mistake as if it mattered.
- Hold some data backTo find out how good a model really is, test it on examples it never saw while it was learning.
- Gradient descentTraining is many small adjustments, each one making the model a little less wrong, with a setting for how big each step is.
Shifts
Work a day with an AI tool, one decision at a time.
Toys
Move an AI and watch what it does.