The Basics · no jargon, no prior knowledge
The world, explained from the ground up
The basics behind the news. Every unfamiliar word gets its own page: what it is, why it exists and why it matters to you. No jargon, no prior knowledge.
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The Basics
This is where the walk up ends. Read just these and the rest starts to make sense.BasicWho makes artificial intelligenceThe same names show up in every story here: OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Google. Here's the map: who builds artificial int...BasicWhat is an AI agentThe word "agent" gets stuck on every other new AI product this year. It doesn't mean a smarter chatbot. It means softwar...BasicWhat is an AI model and how it learnsAn AI (artificial intelligence) model doesn't run on built-in rules - it's trained to guess the next word based on milli...BasicWho pays for the powerEvery answer artificial intelligence gives you passes through a real building, full of machines that seriously eat power...BasicWho protects youEvery time you read "the company patched a critical vulnerability," it sounds like an admission of failure. The opposite...BasicWhat is a serverThe computer that never sleeps - and without which nothing on the internet existsBasicWhat is codeThe computer doesn't think. It reads a recipe and follows it literally, even when the recipe is wrong.BasicWho profits from artificial intelligenceBehind every model there is a bill. Someone puts up the money, someone takes a cut of every payment, and someone's music...
Concepts
The words that come up in every story.A
D
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S
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- The Chinese camp: how the ban gave birth to free AI
- The Chinese models (GLM, Qwen, Seedance, Kling)
- The chips by name: Blackwell, MI350X, Jetson, Xeon, Jalapeño
- The Chip Everyone Buys
- The Digital Services Act (DSA)
- The European AI Act
- The hidden command (prompt injection)
- The Millennium Prize Problems
- The model that runs on your machine
- The pass, the seal, and the second check
- The terminal (the black window)
- The words for chips (HBM, FLOPs, FP4, gigawatt)
- TLS certificates (who vouches that a site is the one it claims to be)
- Tokenised assets
- Token and context window
- TPU and Trainium
- Training and use
W
Who is who
The names: the companies and institutions you will keep meeting.F
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- Teleoperation
- Terraform and infrastructure as code
- The AI companies you'll hear about (Together, Replit, Isomorphic, Perplexity)
- The benchmarks by name (Terminal-Bench, GDPval, Arena, Elo)
- The European Commission and the AI Office
- The groups and the networks (Storm-2949, NetNut, residential proxies)
- The media we cite
- The Riemann hypothesis
- The software that's always full of holes