References: What generative AI actually is

Source material

This lesson is an original adaptation. Its structure, classroom stories, and quoted lines come from the first class of a Harvard Kennedy School course; the prose, framing, and examples for Clawdemy readers are our own. Clawdemy is independent of Harvard, which has not reviewed or endorsed this track.

• The Science and Implications of Generative AI (HKS DPI-681M), Harvard Kennedy School, Spring 2024. Faculty: Sharad Goel, Dan Levy, and Teddy Svoronos. This lesson adapts Class 1: How generative AI works from the Spring 2024 course site, whose content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Both of Sharad Goel’s quoted lines, and the “human language is surprisingly predictable” classroom exercise, come from this class’s lecture videos.
• Official course lecture playlist on YouTube, Harvard Kennedy School. The full lectures, free to watch. We mean it when we encourage you to take the original course alongside this track: good teachers deserve more students.
• The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth, Goldman Sachs Global Economics Analyst, March 2023. The source of the three-feature framing (general, generative, approachable) that the lesson borrows via the Harvard course.
• Sam Altman on X, December 5, 2022. The primary source for the lesson’s reported figure of one million ChatGPT users within five days of launch.

Going deeper

• Official HKS course listing for DPI-681M, Harvard Kennedy School. The in-person course behind the open online materials this track adapts.

On this site

• How AI reads your words (Transformers and LLMs track, shown as AI Foundations in the sidebar). How a model chops text into tokens, the first step of the machinery this lesson deliberately does not re-teach.
• Neural Network Intuition. How a network of simple number-crunching units learns anything at all.
• AI Safety and Alignment. If the tuning and values questions this lesson raises pull at you, this track treats them with the seriousness they deserve.

Adjacent topics

• The next lesson in this track moves from understanding to skill: the anatomy of a good prompt, a small set of parts you can learn in an afternoon.
• The helpful, honest, and safe tuning question, and whose values it should reflect, returns late in this track when the lessons turn to risks and what to do about them.