Eat the Textbook: AI
Not the hype version. The actual version — how transformers work, what training does, why hallucinations happen, and what that means for the technology reshaping every field.
About this course
The public conversation about AI is split between people who think it's magic and people who think it's a scam. Both are wrong in the same way — they don't understand what's actually happening under the hood.
This course fixes that. No CS background required. You'll come out understanding transformers, training, and evaluation at the level of someone who works in the field — because the concepts aren't actually that complicated once the jargon is removed.
What you'll cover
- 1From perceptrons to transformers: the honest history
- 2How training works: gradient descent, loss, and backprop
- 3What language models actually do when they 'understand' text
- 4Why hallucinations happen and what that tells us
- 5Evaluating AI systems: benchmarks, evals, and red-teaming
Who this is for
Audience
Non-technical people who want to understand AI deeply
Prerequisites
None. Intellectual curiosity required.
Your instructor
Kevin Braza
PhD Candidate, UC Davis · CBRN AI Safety Scientist
Chemical engineering PhD candidate, Quantic MBA, former boarding school faculty, and CBRN AI safety scientist at Reinforce Labs. Previously UCSB B.S. Chemistry, Harvard/Amgen, and IB + AP classroom instructor. Teaches at the intersection of chemistry, AI, and systems thinking.
Frequently asked
Do I need to know how to code?
No. The course is conceptual — no coding required, no math beyond basic algebra.
Is this about using AI tools, or understanding them?
Understanding. There are plenty of tutorials on using ChatGPT. This is about knowing what it actually is.
How technical does it get?
Technical enough to be accurate — not technical enough to require a CS degree. The goal is mental models, not implementation.
$997
One-time · Lifetime access
Includes
- 5 video modules
- Annotated readings
- Lifetime access
- Certificate of completion