AI Feels Like Magic (Until You Look Inside)
Everyone talks about AI like it’s this unknowable alien intelligence. But then you open a tutorial, build a tiny neural network that recognizes handwritten numbers, and realize: it’s just math. A lot of math, layered in a specific way, but still math. Multiplications and additions, run millions of times until the outputs start matching reality.
That demystification is what hooked me. The gap between “AI is magic” and “oh, it’s multiplying matrices and adjusting weights” is one afternoon of focused reading. The gap between that and actually building something useful — that’s the longer journey, and that’s what I’m here to document.