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Explanations, worked examples and current reporting in one calm reference. What the machine actually does, what it costs to run, and where the money ends up.
The ecosystem, layer by layer
Article · Applications
Thirty concrete use cases, from the home to the forest, from the production line to a sports club. What the machine does in each, where it goes quietly wrong, and what happens to a use case after it is chosen.
Article · Applications
What a multi-agent system actually is, the four structures you find in one, what each is good for, and when a single agent is enough.
Article · Rules and responsibility
Lists of principles settle nothing. Seven places where the harm actually happens, and the questions that turn them into decisions.
Start here
The order is deliberate. Fundamentals first, then the whole picture, then the examples.
01
Five things that are enough to begin. No technical background, no unexplained terms.
02
The whole chain from electricity and chips to data, models, applications and money.
03
Everyday situations taken apart: what the machine does and what is left to people.
Topics
The fundamentals, five layers from electricity to business, and the rules that cut across all of them.
Concepts
AI, machine learning and language models. Which one sits inside which.
Layer 1
Electricity, chips and very large buildings. Everything starts here.
Layer 2
What the machine learns from, and why your own records are the asset.
Layer 3
Training is paid for once. Running it is paid for every single time.
Layer 4
How a model becomes something that is actually of use to somebody.
Layer 5
Who does what, who pays, and where the money finally settles.
Cross-cutting
What the law requires, what ethics requires, and what has to be written down.
Try it yourself
Pick a word and the model shows which words are most likely to follow it. Let it keep going on its own and you get sentences that are grammatically fine and mean nothing at all. That is hallucination in miniature.
Open the demo“company builds the car the controls and the material is too slow an expensive chip sits and waits”
Examples
“AI handles customer service” tells you nothing. These situations are taken apart piece by piece.
Glossary
When a word turns up that you do not know, the explanation should be right here.
Author
This site is written by Harri Salomaa. Forty years in software, twenty of them in the United States and Germany: from collecting process data and analysing network data to immersive computing, and most recently AI. It is written to be read without a technical background, but without simplifying things into being wrong: when something is uncertain, it says so.