The goblin school

Learn how AI actually works

Four ways in. Wander through the machine in your own room, build a tiny GPT with your own hands, read the papers that started it all, or just look up that word from today's news.

Explore it

Hands-on places to poke at AI. Best on a phone, and every one works on a laptop too.

• Augmented reality

  Nib's Mountain

  Ask a real model a question and follow your words through a life-size GPU rack, a data-center campus and a chip's journey from sand.

  Start the expedition
• Playable demo · reinforcement learning

  The Coin-Loop Goblin

  Pay a goblin in points and watch it learn to farm coins instead of finishing the job. Reward hacking, in about five minutes.

  Train the goblin
• Field guide

  The Goblin Guide to AI Infrastructure

  Chips, memory, racks, power and pipes: how a chatbot answer gets made, and who gets paid along the way.

  Read the guide
• Interactive timeline

  From the perceptron to today

  Two centuries of AI in one scroll, each step linked to its original paper and kept current from the news.

  Unroll the scroll
• 🔒 Members only · sign-in required

  The Library and the Lecture Hall

  A Morgan-style reading room with founding AI papers in a rare-books case, and next door the Professor lecturing at a self-writing blackboard: the artificial neuron, Shannon's word games, the imitation game, the perceptron, ELIZA and backprop.

  Enter the Library 🔒
• 🕯️ On the workbench

  How a Model Thinks

  Nib's Mountain, part two: tokens, attention, and how one hidden note turns the same model into a goblin, a pirate or a caveman.

  Coming soon

Follow the path

If you want a route rather than a pile: twelve units from Lovelace's notes to this week's system cards, each with papers to read, videos to watch, and something to do.

• Curriculum · 12 units

  The Goblin Curriculum

  Thinking machines, the perceptron, rewards, ELIZA, backprop, transformers, scale, assistants, reward hacking, interpretability, agents, and how we measure it all.

  See the units
• Unit 6 · with Andrej Karpathy

  Let's build GPT

  Write a transformer from an empty file and train it on Shakespeare. The hands-on heart of the curriculum.

  Jump to Unit 6

Read it

Fifty papers, from Lovelace's notes to this year's incident reports. Each comes with one sentence on why it matters and how hard it is to read.

• Reading list

  Nib's Reading List

  Foundations · transformers and scaling · alignment and safety · interpretability · reasoning and agents · evals.

  Open the list
• Glossary

  The Goblin Glossary

  METR, ASL, RLHF, sandbox escape, S-1: every word that turns up in the news, in plain English.

  Look something up

Word of the day