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AI Basics

What AI is and how it works, in plain English. Start here.

AI Basics is the place to start if you use ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini but nobody has ever explained the ideas behind them. The posts here cover what a large language model is, how a model learns from data, why it sometimes invents facts, and whether any of it counts as thinking. None of them assume maths or programming.

Read the full introduction

They are written to be read in order, although each one stands alone. The first explains next-word prediction, which almost everything else depends on. The hallucination post includes the site's own test of 26 questions about things that do not exist, and ends with a one-minute check for invented answers. The glossary defines the terms that come up across the site, so it is worth keeping open in another tab.

Readers who want to compare tools rather than understand them can go straight to the comparison of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, or to the posts on benchmark scores and on open and closed models.

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