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Series · Part 0 of 21

Grounding
AI Demystified
Abhishek Saha
Abhishek Saha · 🤖 AI / ML

5 Mental Models You Need Before Diving Into AI

Before you learn how AI works, learn how to think about it. These five mental models will save you hours of confusion.

#ai #mental-models #concepts #beginner
5 Mental Models You Need Before Diving Into AI

Before learning how AI works, you need to see how it actually behaves. Five diagrams. No long explanations.

"The cat sat on the???"
mat
82%
floor
12%
roof
4%
chair
2%
bench
0.5%
NEXT TOKEN PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONSAMPLED, NOT ALWAYS TOP · TEMPERATURE CONTROLS THIS
01
AI predicts, it doesn't think — Every word it writes is sampled from a probability distribution over all possible next tokens — not the top pick every time. Temperature controls how adventurous the sample is.

Every confusion in AI — “why is it confidently wrong?”, “why can’t it count letters?”, “why did it forget what I said?” — traces back to one of these five. Keep them in mind as you go through the series.

Next up: What actually happens when you send a message — from your keypress to the model’s first word.

AI Demystified · 16 of 21 published

  1. 0 Grounding 5 Mental Models You Need Before Diving Into AI
  2. 1 Foundation What Happens When You Ask AI Something?
  3. 2 Foundation Transformers — The Architecture That Changed Everything
  4. 3 Foundation How AI Learns, Thinks, and Decides
  5. 4 Foundation How AI Reads Your Words
  6. 5 Foundation Why AI Forgets
  7. 6 Foundation Why AI Lies (And Doesn't Know It)
  8. 7 Foundation What AI Cannot Do
  9. 8 Foundation How AI Reasons (And Why It Sometimes Breaks)
  10. 9 Practice Prompt Engineering — How to Talk to AI
  11. 10 Practice Embeddings & Vector Databases — The Memory Layer of AI
  12. 11 Practice RAG Explained — How AI Knows What You Didn't Train It On
  13. 12 Practice Fine-tuning vs. Prompting — When to Use Which
  14. 13 Practice Do You Really Need GPT-4?
  15. 14 Practice Latency, Tokens, and Cost — The Physics of AI Products
  16. 15 Practice How Do You Know AI Is Actually Working?
  17. 16 Hands-On Coding Setup — Your AI Development Environment soon
  18. 17 Hands-On MCP Tool Calling — How AI Uses Tools soon
  19. 18 Hands-On AI Agents — Beyond Chatbots soon
  20. 19 Hands-On Build Your First Real AI App soon
  21. 20 Hands-On Token Optimization — Spend Less, Get More soon
Part 1 → What Happens When You Ask AI Something?
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