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Someone else wrote the difficult thing. What this publication adds is the guidance around it: a short account of what a piece is and why it matters, a guide you can keep open beside it, and reading paths that put the pieces in an order that fits where you are starting from. Every work is linked at its original home, and we send you there to read it.
The name is older than it looks — an elucidarium was a plain-language handbook, a master answering a student's questions about a subject too large to approach cold.
One work, and the three documents it comes with: somebody else's original at its own publisher, our page about it, and our guide.
The single best hour you can spend on what a large language model actually is. Karpathy — who helped build these systems at OpenAI and Tesla — explains a model as two files on a computer, shows what training does to…
Thirty days, one idea a day, from nothing to following the argument.
Four routes through the same library, ordered for different backgrounds. Choosing one highlights your path; you can wander off it freely. The choice is saved only in this browser.
No background assumed. The shortest path from 'I keep hearing about AI' to being genuinely conversant: what these systems are, what they do to work, and how to read the news about them.
For engineers and technical people who don't write software for a living. Start with how the systems work, end with what they mean for the person operating them.
For readers trained in philosophy, theology, or political thought. Start with the arguments and their genealogy; branch into the machinery when you want it.
For readers fluent in charts and economic reasoning but not in code. Start with work and incentives; branch into the machinery and the politics.
12 works by other people, curated. A card opens our page about the work; the original is one click on from there, at its own publisher. The minutes on a card are the original's — our guide carries its own.
The single best hour you can spend on what a large language model actually is. Karpathy — who helped build these systems at OpenAI and Tesla — explains a model as two files on a computer, shows what training does to…
The short essay that gave the AI-at-work debate its two most useful metaphors. Reporting a large field experiment he ran with colleagues at Boston Consulting Group, Mollick describes the "jagged frontier": AI is…
Nine hundred words that explain more of the last decade of AI than most books. Sutton looks back over seventy years of AI research and finds one pattern repeating: researchers build human knowledge into their systems,…
You have probably heard that every ChatGPT question "uses a bottle of water." Masley takes that claim, and the wave of news stories behind it, and works through the actual numbers: how much water data centers use…
The optimist's case, made properly. Smith walks through comparative advantage — the two-century-old idea that trade pays even when one side is better at everything — and applies it to a world where AI outperforms humans…
"We retired the horse — why should we be any different?" Krier takes the strongest version of that worry seriously and explains why the economics is more complicated. Comparative advantage can keep human work valuable…
The full version. Where the one-hour talk gives you the shape of a language model, this three-and-a-half-hour lecture opens the machine: how raw internet text becomes training data, what tokens are and why models see…
The most influential statement of the deflationary view: AI as a normal — transformative, but normal — technology like electricity or the internet, not a coming superintelligence. Narayanan and Kapoor argue that what…
The team whose AI 2027 scenario predicted that racing to superhuman AI ends in extinction or an irreversible concentration of power here writes the other branch: their positive plan. In this story, the US and China…
A former Bible-school student discovers, in the depths of losing her faith, that the transhumanist promise — minds uploaded, death defeated, a coming merge with the machine — is Christian eschatology wearing a lab coat.…
The Catholic Church's considered answer to the question the AI industry keeps begging: what is intelligence? Drawing on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Aquinas, the note argues that human…
What should AI look like from the perspective of one person trying to stay productive — and safe — as the internet fills with machine-generated deception? Gwern's answer is the "guardian angel": an AI trained not to be…
The deep-dive layer underneath the compendium: 193 reference articles on the concepts, systems and debates the covered works touch — researched and citation-rich, reviewed for shape rather than line-by-line. Follow the citations for anything load-bearing.
We did not write these works; we explain them, and we send readers to you. If we cover your piece and you would rather we did not — or you want something corrected — tell us.