Show HN: Visual intuitive explanations of LLM concepts (LLM University)

That’s just you. I find the apple thing obvious on first sight and cements an intuition that talk of vectors does not or differently. Why choose?

I'm not sure how much is actually known to write about, but what I'd like to see explained is how transformer-based LLMs/AI really work - not at the mechanistic level of the architecture, but in terms of what they learn (some type of world model ? details, not hand waving!) and how do they utilize this when processing various types of input ?

What type of representations are being used internally in these models ? We've got token embeddings going in, and it seems like some type of semantic embeddings internally perhaps, but exactly what ? OTOH it's outputting words (tokens) with only a linear layer between the last transformer block and the softmax, so what does that say about the representations at that last transformer block ?

IDK, with only GP's comment and the image for context, and some earlier familiarity with the concept of embeddings, I'd put the apple... somewhere near the middle of the picture, nowhere near any of the lettered placement points. To me, the apple fits about equally to all the clusters, excepting bottom-left one, where I couldn't figure out the relationship in few seconds.

EDIT: in some sense, the whole idea and usefulness of embedding comes from it working like the inverse of this kind of "intelligence"/"logic" tests - tests that ask you to which, out of several groups, a new symbol belongs. Usually there are couple competing answers, but the test has you guess the one that's the Right One. Embedding is about subverting this - it's about telling the test giver, "you know what, it actually belongs to all of them", and adding enough dimensions to the problem space that you can have all the groups be far away, from each other, and the new thing close to all of them - to each along a different dimension.

Nice work!

Minor nitpick: The intercom button obscures the topic expansion button for the final appendix in the nav menu. Maybe move intercom to the bottom right instead?

I know this course is meant to be content marketing for your company, and I don't mean this in a derogatory sense--you're doing content marketing right by providing high quality information to an audience who could be interested in your services--but it's a bit odd that going to https://llm.university unceremoniously drops me in the middle of what looks to be your product's documentation. That's not wrong necessarily, but it all adds up to arriving at a site and having a feeling of "what am I looking at?".

Like the grandparent comment mentioned, the pitch is "visual, intuitive explanations", but I don't see that on the landing page. I'm looking for a way to get to the start of your content, but the top and left hand menus don't help and are, if anything, confusing until I realize that I'm now inside of a larger set of documentation unrelated to the course.

Below the fold we see a "Let's get started!", but the link I see, Structure of the Course" doesn't sound like getting started. It sounds like more front matter. From the nav menu I see that after that I still won't get to the content, but instead a page about the instructors. Do I really need to read blurbs of the instructors before I get to the meat of the course?

It just feels like too much wrapping paper and packaging to get to the good stuff--and it really does seem like good stuff! And I think the way that you've embedded this course into the rest of your documentation prevents you from presenting it in a structure that is more familiar and easy to navigate (e.g. an 'About' link at the top that talks about the instructors and Cohere).

It might be frustrating to put a lot of time and effort into high quality materials, only for people to not want to spend a few minutes looking around, but from the audience perspective, there's a sea of LLM-related content out there. I want to quickly determine if this is worth adding to my already-too-long list of LLM related bookmarks of things I want to read.