For someone who is not tech savvy, but wants to learn more about AI and how it all works, where is the best place to start?
Are there any courses?
I don't want to just use AI / Chat-GPT / Copilot etc.
I want to understand how it works
#How does AI work?
jaunty copper
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Hi @jaunty copper. I'm kapa.ai, your friendly support bot. I will try to answer your question by searching through the knowledge base. :wave:
AI systems like ChatGPT work by learning patterns from very large amounts of data, then using those patterns to predict what comes next (a word, a pixel, a sound) one step at a time. During training, the model sees examples like “Instead of turning left, she turned ___” and gradually adjusts internal numeric “weights” so it becomes good at guessing likely completions such as “right,” “around,” or “back.” [How ChatGPT works] These weights encode patterns, but the model does not store or look up exact copies of its training data; instead it generates new outputs based on what it has learned. [How ChatGPT works]
Over time, this same basic idea—learning patterns and predicting the next step—has been scaled up with more data, more computation, and more advanced architectures (like transformers), leading to modern systems that can handle language, images, and more. [Summarizing long docs]
For someone who is not tech‑savvy and wants to understand AI rather than just use it, a good path is:
- Start with plain‑language explanations
OpenAI’s help article “What is ChatGPT?” explains, in non‑technical terms, what ChatGPT is, what it can do, and some basics of how it was trained (including reinforcement learning from human feedback). [What is ChatGPT]
The policy article “How ChatGPT and our foundation models are developed” goes a bit deeper into how models are trained on large datasets and how they learn patterns. [How ChatGPT works]
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Take beginner‑friendly AI courses
OpenAI specifically recommends OpenAI Academy, a free learning hub aimed at boosting AI literacy for a broad audience (teachers, students, small‑business owners, etc.). It covers AI fundamentals and practical, responsible use, and is a good starting point if you don’t have a technical background. [OpenAI Academy] -
Move on to slightly more technical video courses (optional next step)
When you’re ready to see “under the hood” a bit more, OpenAI’s documentation points to several external video courses: [Video courses]- Andrew Ng’s DeepLearning.AI short course on “ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers” – still practical and approachable; you’ll see how models are used and get some intuition for how they behave.
- Andrej Karpathy’s “Let’s build GPT” (YouTube) – a deeper dive into how GPT‑style models work internally. This is more technical, but it’s an excellent way to understand the mechanics once you’re comfortable with the basics.
- Read simple overviews of AI concepts
OpenAI’s Cookbook examples on AI and GPT summarize, in relatively accessible language, ideas like:- AI as machines that perceive their environment and act to achieve goals. [Summarizing long docs]
- Neural networks and deep learning: layered systems that learn to recognize patterns from data. [Summarizing long docs]
- GPT models as “Generative Pre‑trained Transformers” that learn from large text corpora to predict the next token and generate human‑like text. [Summarizing long docs]