How does AI learn? Nobody teaches it a single fact: it guesses the next word, gets it wrong, and fixes itself a tiny bit, trillions of times.

We follow a brand-new model from random gibberish to a helpful assistant: the next-word guessing game, backpropagation and gradient descent explained as a walk downhill in the fog, the 1958 Perceptron that was supposed to walk and talk, Llama 3’s 54-day training run, why a model doesn’t store the internet, how human feedback teaches it manners, why AI hallucinates, and whether ChatGPT learns from your chats.

WATCH NEXT
What Happens Inside an AI Chip When You Ask a Question https://youtu.be/Iuntbe22Z0E
How Does a Memory Chip Remember Anything? https://youtu.be/W_laZ_c5A_s
How a CPU Really Works (It Has to Guess the Future) https://youtu.be/9uYV_Xq6g6w
CHAPTERS
00:00 The first wrong answer
00:43 Weights: who set the taps?
01:21 The guessing game: next-word prediction
02:26 Gradient descent: downhill in the fog
03:25 The Perceptron: walk and talk
04:09 Training data: the biggest homework
05:04 Backpropagation: a million tiny turns
05:59 Where did the internet go?
06:50 Human feedback: teaching manners
07:33 Why AI makes things up
08:29 Does AI learn from your chats?
09:16 Wrong, then less wrong

SOURCES
Learning representations by back-propagating errors (Rumelhart, Hinton, Williams, Nature, 1986)
Frank Rosenblatt’s Perceptron, 1958 (Cornell Chronicle)
The Llama 3 Herd of Models (Meta, 2024)
Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback (Ouyang et al., 2022)
Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models (Carlini et al., USENIX Security 2021)
Why Language Models Hallucinate (Kalai et al., OpenAI, 2025)
Stanford AI Index Report 2024 (training cost estimates, with Epoch AI)
Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 (Hopfield and Hinton)

NOTES
Animations are illustrations: a real model has billions of weights, not a city of taps, and the “mountain” is a simplified picture of the error landscape. “About 3,500 GPU-years”, “about a million steps”, “more than 100,000 times more words than a child hears” and the model-vs-text size comparison are our rough calculations from the sources above. Training cost figures are published estimates.
Original animation, music and sound by Under the Lid.

#AI #HowItWorks #MachineLearning

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This morning you took a hot shower, combed your hair, and nobody noticed. In Viking Norway, that comb said everything about …

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How People REALLY Survived Winter in Medieval England in 1300

DISCLAIMER

THIS VIDEO FEATURES METICULOUSLY RESEARCHED HISTORICAL NARRATIVES WRITTEN AND COMPILED BY OUR TEAM. THE VISUALS ARE ARTISTICALLY DIRECTED RECONSTRUCTIONS DESIGNED TO ILLUSTRATE DAILY LIFE IN THE PAST. TO PROVIDE A SEAMLESS SLEEP-AID EXPERIENCE, ALL AUDIO, PACING, AND SUBTITLES HAVE BEEN MANUALLY EDITED.

CREATED FOR EDUCATIONAL STORYTELLING AND RELAXATION, SOME DETAILS MAY BE DRAMATIZED OR SIMPLIFIED. OUR GOAL IS TO SHARE RICH, HANDCRAFTED HISTORICAL DOCUMENTARIES THAT OFFER BOTH VALUABLE KNOWLEDGE AND A CALMING ATMOSPHERE.

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Go to the baby section of any store: one aisle pink, one aisle blue. You’ve probably heard the clever answer: pink used to be for boys, until the colours suddenly flipped.

Here’s the real story. Babies wore white for most of history. Pink and blue drifted in during the 1800s, and for decades nobody agreed which was which. Postwar fashion, and later prenatal tests and big-ticket baby gear, picked one answer and sold it everywhere. And the famous “pink was for boys” flip? The evidence says it’s mostly a myth too.

Chapters:
0:00 One aisle pink, one aisle blue
0:26 The rule today
1:00 Everyone wore white
2:01 Pink and blue arrive
3:29 The rule wins
4:31 The lock-in
5:33 The myth of the flip
7:27 Messy advice
8:32 Back to the store

Sources:
– Smithsonian Magazine: When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?
– Marco Del Giudice (2012), Archives of Sexual Behavior: the pink-blue reversal as a scientific urban legend?
– Del Giudice (2017) update using newspapers and magazines, 1881–1930 (University of Turin repository)
– Museum London (Canada): 1870s–80s boy’s dress
– University of Maryland American Studies (Jo Paoletti) page
– The Chronicle of Higher Education: Little Boy Blue and Little Girls, Too
– Discover Magazine: Did boys use to wear pink? (and revisited)
– Live Science; NYU IFP; Storiel museum blog (Wales)
– Wikipedia: Gendered associations of pink and blue; List of historical sources

Illustrations of real people are generic and are not likenesses. Quotes are shown as reported by the sources above; disputed points are labelled as disputed in the video.

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The tapeworm diet is one of those ideas that is far more famous than it is real. Biologically it barely works: an adult tapeworm takes …

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