Understand the machine first.

Then train, fine-tune, and deploy honestly.

I'm Zafrullah Khan, Ed.D. I write short lessons on what language models actually do, and how to decide when to prompt, retrieve, fine-tune or train one. Start with this week's lesson.

This week's lesson

Glowing circuit tree on a midnight background with the words: A language model is a guessing machine you can steer.

Week 1 · Mental model of an LLM The guessing machine: what a language model really does, and how to close the gap A language model doesn't look things up. It guesses the next token, and you can steer it. Here's what that means, and four ways to close the gap between the model you have and the one you need.