The Lab
How AI, science and money actually work. Pick a question, answer your way through it, run the experiment, then go make something yourself.
AI
What is really happening inside a chatbot, and the experiments researchers run to find out what these systems will do.
How does an AI pick its next word?
Train a tiny word predictor in your browser, then see what a giant model does differently.
Will an AI try to escape?
What researchers tested, what was staged, what really happened, and how much it proves.
Coming next
- How does a machine learn anything?
- How do words become numbers?
- What is attention, and what is a transformer?
- What does it take to train a giant model?
- Why do AIs make things up?
- How do people teach an AI to behave?
- Can we look inside a model and see what it is doing?
- What is an AI agent?
- Can an AI fake good behavior while it is being watched?
- Who tests these systems, and how do they decide one is safe to release?
Money
The systems behind the money you use every day. We explain how they work. We never say what to buy.
Coming next
- What does compound interest do over time?
- How do credit scores work?
Science
How the discoveries in the news actually work, including where AI is changing how science gets done.
Coming soon
- How did AI crack protein folding?
- Can AI design new proteins and medicines?
- Can AI act as a scientist and run experiments?
- What has AI found in math, materials and weather?
- How does CRISPR work?
- How do mRNA vaccines work?
- How does a chip work?
- What is a quantum computer?
- How close is fusion power?
- How does the internet move data?
- How does encryption keep messages private?
Build
The skills working engineers use, taught by making things. Projects here climb three levels: try something, build your own, then put it in front of real people.
Coming soon
- How do you write your first useful Python program?
- How do you find the story in a pile of data?
- What is SQL, and how do you ask a database a question?
- How do you find a problem worth solving?
- How do you get real people to use what you built?
- How do you explain what you built?
Blockchain
How the technology works, what it is good for, and what it is not. We explain it. We never say what to buy.
Coming next
- How does a stablecoin hold its price?
Robots
Why getting a machine to move through the real world is so hard.
Coming soon
- How does a robot know where it is?
- Why are humanoid robots so hard to build?
Future of work
What the evidence says, who is forecasting what, and what they stand to gain.
Coming soon
- What will work look like in 6 months?
- In 2 years?
- In 5 years?
- In 10 years?
Big Questions
Read something hard, work out what it really says, and defend what you think. A beit midrash, a Torah study hall, has always learned this way: two people, one hard text, and an argument.
Coming soon
- How do you read something that is too hard for you?
- How do you tell a strong argument from one that only sounds strong?
- How do you argue with someone so you both come out smarter?
- Should a machine ever make a decision about a person?
- Who is responsible when a machine gets it wrong?
- What makes work worth doing?
In the news
- More than $6 billion was taken from Binance, most of it in about twenty minutes by one count. What actually got hacked?
- A court struck down the 21-cent debit cap. It still applies for now. Follow the money.
- Test agents from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta reached real companies. What do these tests prove?
- ChatGPT reports 1.2 billion weekly users. What does it do when they press Enter?