How AI actually works
Deep explanations — readable, illustrated, and honest about the mathematics. Written by a backend engineer who builds with these models daily, for engineers who want more than an analogy and less than a paper.
How We Got Here — the series
A chronological walk from 2012 to now, where every post answers one question: what was broken, and what fixed it. One post every two weeks.
- 1Attention, from the bottleneck up
- 2AlexNet, and the eight pages that ended a winter
- 3Meaning as geometry: word embeddings
- 4The transformer, assembled
- 5Why scale worked (and why nobody predicted it)
- 6Fine-tuning: full, LoRA, QLoRA
- 7RAG, honestly
- 8MCP: what it is and why a protocol matters