AI Unmasked: How the Machine Really Works (The Great Reconfiguration)
Everyone has an opinion about AI. Almost no one knows how it actually works.
Strip away the headlines and the hand-waving and the secret is almost insulting in its simplicity: artificial intelligence is not a mind, not a ghost, not magic. It's arithmetic running on silicon - billions of tiny switches, arranged cleverly enough to surprise the people who arranged them.
In AI Unmasked, builder and operator Sruly Rosenberg opens the hood and walks you the whole way - from a single on/off switch to large language models, AI agents, and the real question of superintelligence - in plain language, with no math and no mystique. Every concept is built from the one before it, so you never have to take anything on faith. By the last page you'll understand AI better than ninety-nine out of a hundred people who use it every day.
And once you can see the mechanism, something changes for good: the hype stops dazzling you, and the doom stops scaring you.
What you'll learn - the complete A-to-Z:
- How a switch becomes a transistor, a chip, and finally a thinking-seeming machine - the full ladder, one rung at a time
- What "zeros and ones," programming, and the internet really are, with zero jargon
- How machine learning, neural networks, and large language models actually work inside
- Why ChatGPT can sound human without understanding a word - and what that means for you
- The honest truth about consciousness: what AI is, what it isn't, and the myths to drop
- AI agents, the real new risks, and a future you can face without fear
- Who built the machine, what it cost, and where the road goes from here
No prior tech background needed - if you can read this page, you can understand the machine. Pull back the curtain. There's no wizard. Just the machine, finally explained.
A note on currency: model names and benchmarks move weekly; the machinery this book explains does not move at all - that's the part that lasts.
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