🤖 A MENTAL MODEL OF THE MACHINE
Most AI training tells you which buttons to press. This course does something more durable: it explains how generative AI actually works, so you can predict for yourself where it’ll help you 🙌 and where it’ll quietly let you down 🚧.
🧩 Four properties, one mental model
Next Token
Prediction
What it’s really doing when it “answers”
Knowledge
What it knows, and why it sometimes invents
Working
Memory
What it can hold in mind at once
Steerability
How much you can shape it — and where that stops
These four stay stable even as models improve. The boundaries move every few months 📈 — the properties underneath don’t. Learn them once, and you can size up any future AI tool in minutes instead of relearning from scratch. ♻️
🎬 Watch the 2-minute trailer
🎬 Tap to watch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
👥 Who this is for
Anyone using AI at work or on their studies — apprentice, tutor, assessor, or business support. 🎒 No technical background needed.
📐 At a glance
Lessons
Topics
Hands-on checks
Summary quiz
Self-paced
No cost
🗺️ How it’s structured
🚀 Getting started → 🎲 next token prediction → 🧠 knowledge → 🗂️ working memory → 🎛️ steerability → 🧩 putting it together. Every property gets an explanation plus a “🧪 Try It Out” — because reading about a limitation is nothing like watching it happen in front of you.
🎥 A taste of Lesson 1
Lesson 1 links a full companion video series from Anthropic. Here’s how it opens:
🎓 Produced by Anthropic. The full 12-video playlist is linked inside Lesson 1 — this is just the opener.
🏆 By the end you’ll be able to
- 💬 Explain in plain English what generative AI is doing when it produces an answer
- 🔎 Recognise the four properties at work in your own AI use
- ✅ Predict which tasks are safe to delegate — and which need close checking
- 🩺 Diagnose why an AI interaction went wrong, rather than just retrying and hoping
📌 Developed by City Skills, drawing on the AI fluency framework popularised by Anthropic’s Claude Academy — with every example and explanation written for a UK apprenticeship and workplace context.
Course Includes
- 6 -
- 5 Topics
