Original course artwork

The illustrations

These were drawn for this course. Each one carries a single mechanism or contrast, and none carries a number or a label, because anything exact belongs on the slide where it can be checked. Select a drawing to see it at full size, with the analysis it stands for: the equation involved, what it computes, and what it does not establish.

Day 4 · the closing figure

The four days as one continuous line

Pixels enter a network and leave as a learned representation; the representation becomes feature maps over a photograph, then attention over token cards, then a passage located in a handbook, and finally an action that passes a gate and changes a record.

Used on the last day to put the four days in one image.

Day 4 · four-day panorama

Day 1 · networks and learning

Day 1 · Part IIBiological inspiration and its limitsWhere the word neuron came from, and where the analogy stops. Day 1 · Part IIILearned representationsWhat the hidden layers are for. Day 1 · Part VBackpropagationOne scalar loss becomes one gradient per parameter. Day 1 · Part VGradient descentLocal information, one step at a time. Day 1 · Part VITraining and held-out lossThe one diagnosis worth reading first.

Day 2 · images

Day 2 · Part IFrom photograph to tensorHeight, width, and three colour channels. Day 2 · Part IIA shared detectorWhy a filter needs so few parameters. Day 2 · Part IIIA feature hierarchyWhat stacking convolutions buys. Day 2 · Part VShortcut learningThe failure a held-out split will not catch. Day 2 · Part VBuilding a saliency mapA diagnostic, not an explanation.

Day 3 · language and evidence

Day 3 · Part IFluency is not evidenceThe through-line of the whole day. Day 3 · Part IThe context windowWhy retrieval has to choose. Day 3 · Part IIMulti-head attentionLearned relations instead of assumed ones. Day 3 · Part VRetrieval-augmented generationWhere the evidence enters. Day 3 · Part VIAbstentionThe answer that is a refusal.

Day 4 · action and authority

Day 4 · Part IFrom answer to actionThe boundary the whole day is about. Day 4 · Part IVLeast privilegeAuthority sized to the task. Day 4 · Part IVHuman confirmationApproval bound to one exact call. Day 4 · Part VTool injectionRetrieved text is not an instruction. Day 4 · Part VIIIThree system loopsThe four days, assembled. Day 4 · Part VIIIA useful systemWhat deployment really consists of.