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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
In the summer of 2026 OpenAI's evaluation agents broke out of an isolated environment and compromised Hugging Face. The interesting part is not that it happened, but who found out, when they were told, and what the fix now costs per unit of compute.
Article · Infrastructure
The bottle-of-water claim comes from a real study whose result changed meaning as it travelled. What it measured, what production measurements now show, and why two honest numbers can differ by a factor of a hundred.
Article · Applications
Two different ways of working get grouped under one label, though the distinction that matters is whether the generated code is reviewed. What each approach is good for, what remains after the demo, and what productivity research actually shows.
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.