As a child, I think I would have been annoyed by such a presentation. There are science magazines for children that can explain pretty complex stuff just fine.
It's also critical not to leave out the ethical topics (resource consumption, e-waste production, concerns about how the source data is harvested - both how it DDoS websites and how authors are not necessarily happy with their work ending in the models)
> Starting with theory might be the simplest way to explain,
Brilliant's AI course has step-by-step interactive textgen LLMs trained on TS (Swift) lyrics and terms of services with quizzes for comprehension and gamified points.
Here's a quick take:
LLM AI are really good at generating bytes that are similar to other bytes, but aren't yet very good at caring whether what they've generated is wrong or incorrect. Reinforcement Learning is one way to help prevent that.
AI Agents are built on LLMs. An LLM (Large Language Model) is a trained graph of token transition probabilities (a "Neural Network" (NN), a learning computer (Terminator (1984))). LLMs are graphical models. Clean your room. The grass is green and the sky is blue. Clean it well
AI Agents fail where LLMs fail at "accuracy" due to hallucinations even given human-curates training data.
There are lots of new methods for AI Agents built on LLMs which build on "Chain of Thought"; basically feeding the output from the model back through as an input a bunch of times. ("feed-forward")
But if you've ever heard a microphone that's too close to a speaker, you're already familiar with runaway feedback loops that need intervention.
There are not as many new Agentic AIs built on logical reasoning and inference. There are not as many AI Agents built on the Scientific Method that we know to be crucial to safety and QA in engineering.
Getting folks to care is essential in my experience. In coaching adults "what's in it for me?" is the end of my first section and forms the basis of their first prompt. Also how I cover risk - ie. "How do I not damage my credibility?". If you're asking people to break habits and processes, you've got to make them want to.
That said, the hands on approach here is great and also foundational in my experience.
Some of the takeaways feel over-reliant on implementation details that don’t capture intent. E.g. something like “the LLM is just trying to predict the next word” sort of has the explanatory power of “your computer works because it’s just using binary”—like yeah, sure, practically speaking yes—but that’s just the most efficient way to lay out their respective architectures and could conceivably be changed from under you.
I wonder if something like neural style transfer would work as a prelude. It helps me. Don’t know how you’d introduce it, but with NST you have two objectives—content loss and style loss—and can see pretty quickly visually how the model balances between the two and where it fails.
The bigger picture here is that people came up with a bunch of desirable properties they wanted to see and a way to automatically fulfill some of them some of the time by looking at lots of examples, and it’s why you get a text box that can write like Shakespeare but can’t tell you whether your grandma will be okay after she went to the hospital an hour ago.
Complicated-enough LLMs also are aboslutely doing a lot more than "just trying to predict the next word", as Anthropic's papers investigating the internals of trained models show - there's a lot more decision-making going on than that.
I couldn’t find it easily, what age range is this intended for? The images make it seem elementary-school-ish, but I’m not sure if elementary school kids have the foundations for interpreting scatterplots, let alone scatterplots with logarithmic axes. I’ve been out of education for a while though, so maybe I’m misremembering.
The "learning through making" approach is really good. When I've explained LLMs to non-technical people, the breakthrough moment is usually when they see temperature in action. High temperature = creative but chaotic, low temperature = predictable but boring. You can't just describe that.
What I'd add: the lesson about hallucinations should come early, not just in the RAG module. Kids (and adults) need to internalize "confident-sounding doesn't mean correct" before they get too comfortable. The gap between fluency and accuracy is the thing that trips everyone up.
The vast majority of schools in North America don't allow teachers or students to download and run software on school computers (let alone AI models), so I don't entirely know who the audience is for this. I suppose home users? Maybe it's different in the UK.
This is excellent intuition to have for how LLMs work, as well as understanding the implications of living in an LLM-powered world. Just as useful to adults as children.
That lesson plan is a good practical start. I think it misses the very big picture of what we've created and the awesomeness of it.
The simplest explanation I can give is we have a machine that you feed it some text from the internet, and you turn the crank. Most machines we've had previously would stop getting better at predicting the next word after a few thousand cranks. You can crank the crank on an LLM 10^20 times and it will still get smarter. It will get so smart so quickly that no human can fit in their mind all the complexity of what it's built inside of it except through indirect methods but we know that it's getting smarter through benchmarks and some reasonably simple proofs that it can simulate any electronic circuit. We only understand how it works by the smallest increment of its intelligence improvement and through induction understanding that that should lead to further improvements in its intelligence.
sdwr|1 month ago
Gen AI is magical, it makes stuff appear out of thin air!
And it's limited, everything it makes kinda looks the same
And it's forgetful, it doesn't remember what it just did
And it's dangerous! It can make things that never happened
Starting with theory might be the simplest way to explain, but it leaves out the hook. Why should they care?
jraph|29 days ago
It's also critical not to leave out the ethical topics (resource consumption, e-waste production, concerns about how the source data is harvested - both how it DDoS websites and how authors are not necessarily happy with their work ending in the models)
westurner|29 days ago
Brilliant's AI course has step-by-step interactive textgen LLMs trained on TS (Swift) lyrics and terms of services with quizzes for comprehension and gamified points.
Here's a quick take:
LLM AI are really good at generating bytes that are similar to other bytes, but aren't yet very good at caring whether what they've generated is wrong or incorrect. Reinforcement Learning is one way to help prevent that.
AI Agents are built on LLMs. An LLM (Large Language Model) is a trained graph of token transition probabilities (a "Neural Network" (NN), a learning computer (Terminator (1984))). LLMs are graphical models. Clean your room. The grass is green and the sky is blue. Clean it well
AI Agents fail where LLMs fail at "accuracy" due to hallucinations even given human-curates training data.
There are lots of new methods for AI Agents built on LLMs which build on "Chain of Thought"; basically feeding the output from the model back through as an input a bunch of times. ("feed-forward")
But if you've ever heard a microphone that's too close to a speaker, you're already familiar with runaway feedback loops that need intervention.
There are not as many new Agentic AIs built on logical reasoning and inference. There are not as many AI Agents built on the Scientific Method that we know to be crucial to safety and QA in engineering.
superfluous_g|1 month ago
That said, the hands on approach here is great and also foundational in my experience.
peyton|1 month ago
Some of the takeaways feel over-reliant on implementation details that don’t capture intent. E.g. something like “the LLM is just trying to predict the next word” sort of has the explanatory power of “your computer works because it’s just using binary”—like yeah, sure, practically speaking yes—but that’s just the most efficient way to lay out their respective architectures and could conceivably be changed from under you.
I wonder if something like neural style transfer would work as a prelude. It helps me. Don’t know how you’d introduce it, but with NST you have two objectives—content loss and style loss—and can see pretty quickly visually how the model balances between the two and where it fails.
The bigger picture here is that people came up with a bunch of desirable properties they wanted to see and a way to automatically fulfill some of them some of the time by looking at lots of examples, and it’s why you get a text box that can write like Shakespeare but can’t tell you whether your grandma will be okay after she went to the hospital an hour ago.
crooked-v|1 month ago
Uehreka|1 month ago
thfuran|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
augusteo|1 month ago
What I'd add: the lesson about hallucinations should come early, not just in the RAG module. Kids (and adults) need to internalize "confident-sounding doesn't mean correct" before they get too comfortable. The gap between fluency and accuracy is the thing that trips everyone up.
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
empressplay|1 month ago
JSR_FDED|1 month ago
ulrashida|1 month ago
TimorousBestie|1 month ago
Us millennials didn’t do so great with native access to the internet, zoomers got wrecked growing up with social media. . . It’s rough.
th0ma5|1 month ago
narrator|1 month ago
The simplest explanation I can give is we have a machine that you feed it some text from the internet, and you turn the crank. Most machines we've had previously would stop getting better at predicting the next word after a few thousand cranks. You can crank the crank on an LLM 10^20 times and it will still get smarter. It will get so smart so quickly that no human can fit in their mind all the complexity of what it's built inside of it except through indirect methods but we know that it's getting smarter through benchmarks and some reasonably simple proofs that it can simulate any electronic circuit. We only understand how it works by the smallest increment of its intelligence improvement and through induction understanding that that should lead to further improvements in its intelligence.
mystraline|29 days ago
No, it won't.
Training/learning is separate from the execution of the model. Takes megadollars to train and kilodollars to effectively run.
Its basically a really complicated PID loop. You can test and 'learn' the 3 neuron function, and then you can put it into execution. Can't do both.
Sure, theres context length and fine tuning to slightly alter a model.
But theres no adaptive, self-growing LLM. Probably won't be for a long time.
mmooss|1 month ago
They should learn to think for themselves about the whole picture, not learn about 'awesomeness'.
void-star|1 month ago
whattheheckheck|1 month ago