What you’re actually dealing with

The honest, no-hype explanation of what AI is, what it isn’t, and why it matters right now.

AI is having a moment, and most of the explanations you’ve read are either dense enough to put you off or vague enough to be useless. This session is neither. It’s a plain-language walk through what large language models actually are, how they produce the answers they produce, and why “AI” today is a much narrower thing than the word suggests. This is aimed at anyone who has used ChatGPT or Claude a few times and wants to understand what’s really going on under the hood. If you’ve never touched an AI tool before, you’ll be fine. If you already use them daily but feel like you’re guessing about what they can and can’t do, you’ll leave with a sturdier mental model. By the end of the 60 minutes you will: • Know what a large language model actually does, in plain language. • Understand why these tools hallucinate, why they’re confidently wrong, and when that matters. • Be able to tell when AI is the right tool for a job and when it isn’t. • Have a working framework for everything else on the platform - every other session builds on this one. How the session runs: we start with 20 minutes on history and context - where these systems came from and what’s changed in the last three years. Then we walk through how a model actually generates a response, using real examples you can try yourself. The last stretch is questions: bring the ones you’ve been embarrassed to ask. Bring your laptop. That’s it.