AI Literacy
Understand what AI is, how it works, and where it fails — without writing a line of code.
For PMs, managers, and the curious — no coding · 16 articles · ~17.5h · 5 stages
- 1
Get oriented
- What Is AI, and How Do People Actually Use It?Forget the definitions. Here are the five things people actually do with AI every day, and what connects them.Entry
- What AI Can and Cannot Do (Yet)A capability map: what current AI is genuinely good at, what it fails at, and the dangerous middle category where it looks competent but isn't.Entry
- The AI Jargon DecoderThirty AI terms, each in one sentence, each linked to a fuller explanation. Use it as an index when a word blocks you mid-article.Entry
- In What Order Should You Learn AI?A dependency-ordered path through AI concepts, from tokens to agents — plus three routes depending on how deep you actually need to go.Entry
- 2
How it actually works
- What Is a Token in AI?A token is the unit an AI model actually reads — not a word, not a letter. It explains your bill, your context limit, and why models miscount letters.Foundations
- What Is an LLM?Understand how language models generate text, how training differs from inference, and what an AI application adds.Foundations
- What Does "7B Parameters" Mean?Parameters are the adjustable numbers that hold everything a model learned. Why the count matters, and why it stopped being the whole story.Foundations
- How Does an LLM Actually Write?One token at a time, each conditioned on everything before it. The generation loop explains streaming, cost, and why models cannot revise.Foundations
- What Is an Embedding?Embeddings turn meaning into coordinates, which is what lets a machine compute with language. The foundation under search, RAG, and attention.Foundations
- 3
What it cannot do
- Why Do AI Models Hallucinate?Fluent, confident, wrong. Hallucination is not a bug in the system — it follows directly from what the system was built to do.Prompting
- What Is a Context Window?One token budget covering your prompt, the conversation history, retrieved documents, and the answer being generated. Everything competes for the same space.Prompting
- 4
Putting it to use
- Prompt BasicsNot magic words. Prompting is task specification, and four reusable structures cover most of what works.Prompting
- What Is an AI Agent?Strip the hype and an agent is three things: a model that can call tools, a loop, and the authority to decide what happens next.Agents
- Why RAG ExistsA model cannot know your documents and will confidently invent answers about them. RAG is the fix, and the problem is worth understanding before the solution.RAG
- Which Model Should You Use?Match the model tier to the task rather than defaulting to the largest. A framework that survives the next model release.Application
- 5
The landscape