compute
3 free lessons tagged compute across AI. Each one is a short sequence of focused steps with narration and a five-question quiz at the end — take them in any order, no signup required.
Inside the machine that runs AI
An AI data center is not a warehouse of ordinary computers; it is a single supercomputer built from tens of thousands of specialized chips wired together. Learn why GPUs beat regular processors for AI, why the network between chips matters as much as the chips, why one company dominates the market, and the cost structure that makes these buildings so expensive.
Why AI turned into a compute problem
Modern AI got better mainly by getting bigger, and bigger means more computation, which is why the story of AI is now a story about hardware, power, and money. Learn what compute actually is, why scaling laws made more of it pay off so reliably, the difference between training and inference demand, and why this buildout is unlike previous technology booms.
LLM Scaling Laws: From Kaplan to Chinchilla and Beyond
How two landmark papers — Kaplan et al. 2020 and DeepMind's Chinchilla 2022 — rewrote our understanding of compute-optimal training, why the industry now deliberately overtrains models, and how inference costs flip the math entirely.