Research papers, investigations, explainers, videos, laws and the organizations doing the work, from people who are alarmed and people who are skeptical. New additions are checked by two people before they are listed. The launch collection was compiled with the help of AI research assistants, and every link was opened and checked on 22 September 2026.
7 works on “How does AI actually work?” · clear filters
An eight-minute animated explainer of what a large language model is: a program trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next word, then refined with human feedback into a chatbot.
Short animated explainer of how chatbots like ChatGPT work: a model trained on vast amounts of text that repeatedly predicts the next word.
Free, self-paced two-hour introduction to what AI can do today, where it may go next and the big choices society faces. No technical background needed; longer courses follow.
Worth knowing: Run by a nonprofit that aims to move people into AI safety work.
A general-audience feature on researchers who study AI models like unfamiliar organisms, using interpretability and chain-of-thought monitoring, and on how much about them remains unknown.
Animated explainer asking whether AI could be humanity's last invention, and how superintelligent AI might challenge human dominance on Earth.
An accessible explainer on why a model trained to imitate human text can state things that are false, and why getting AI to report what it really knows is an open research problem.
Worth knowing: Made in 2022, before today's reasoning models.
A free, self-paced online course on the basics of AI for non-experts, with no complicated math or programming required; more than two million people from over 170 countries have enrolled.
Worth knowing: A general introduction to AI, first launched in 2018.