I Wrote an Interactive Tutorial for Learning AI

If AI is the most important thing to happen in human history, it's worth understanding how it works.

I’ve written an interactive tutorial that explains how modern AI models work. You can try it out at https://learnai.robennals.org

The genesis of this tutorial is that I wanted my 11 year old son Isaac to understand how modern AI works.

I looked at existing tutorials, but all the ones I could find were either too hand-wavey, required a level of existing expertise he didn’t have, or just weren’t sufficiently “fun” for him to want to complete them. Maybe something better existed, but I didn’t find it. So I decided to create my own.

The tutorial is built as a set of 58 interactive playgrounds, each of which lets you play with one of the core ideas behind AI until you really get it. I find it much easier (and more fun) to learn by playing with something than by reading about it.

Currently the tutorial starts from scratch and works its way up to Transformers, with stops along the way for things like optimization, neural networks, attention, and embedding. I’m planning to add a load more chapters in the future. Subscribe to this Substack to get notified when I publish more.

When Isaac finished the tutorial his first remark was “Transformers are really cool”, and indeed they are.

Stop reading this blog post. Go have a play with the tutorial here: https://learnai.robennals.org