AI Fundamentals: How Modern AI Actually Works
A beginner-friendly walkthrough of what today's AI systems are, how they learn from data, and the vocabulary you need to follow any AI conversation with confidence.
Who this course is for
People who keep hearing AI terms at work or online and want to follow those conversations properly rather than nodding along. No technical background is assumed and no math appears anywhere in it. If you have used ChatGPT a few times but could not explain what it is actually doing, this is written for you.
What you will learn
- What the word AI actually refers to in practice today, and why the popular definition is broader than the useful one
- How a model learns patterns from data, described without equations
- What tokens and context windows are, and why they explain most of the odd behavior you notice in chat tools
- How embeddings let software work with meaning rather than exact words, which is what makes AI search feel different from keyword search
Before you start
None. If you can use a web browser, you can follow this course. There is no math, no code, and no assumption that you have used an AI tool before — though it will make more sense if you have.
Course contents
What AI Actually Is
The Vocabulary of Large Language Models
After this course
You will be able to read an article about AI and tell the substance from the marketing, and you will understand why these tools fail in the specific ways they do — which is the part that makes you harder to mislead, both by hype and by dismissal. The natural next step is Prompt Engineering for Real Work, which turns that understanding into better results from the tools themselves.