Lecture 1: Welcome!
What’s actually happening when you chat with an AI? This opening lecture demystifies large language models from the ground up — tokens, neural networks, weights and layers, and the two-stage journey from training to inference that turns raw text into a working chatbot. Along the way we introduce the concepts (context windows, transformers, attention) that explain both what makes modern AI so capable and why it still confidently gets things wrong, including hallucination, sycophancy, and the pull to anthropomorphize a fundamentally statistical tool. No coding or technical background required — by the end, you’ll have a working mental model for what AI can and can’t do, which every later lecture builds on.