Tendril
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Builders · Ages 11–13
Compare Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Flux side-by-side. Learn prompt engineering and catch hallucinations.
Meet your guide: Wren — a sharp raven
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Chapters
Modules · 37
You cannot understand modern AI without understanding its diet. Let's map where the data comes from, how it gets cleaned, and what that means.
The line between deep reasoning and clever pattern recognition is blurry. Here's how researchers try to tell them apart.
OpenClaw is open-source software that runs agents on your own machine — no cloud dependency, your data stays put. A tour of why it exists and how its pieces fit together.
Every big AI has a free version. Stack them side-by-side and learn where each one runs out of gas.
When the question is 'what happened this week?' or 'what does this paper say?', Perplexity is often the right answer. Here is why.
AI in your browser turns every webpage into something you can interrogate. Learn which extension to install, and why that access needs trust.
Deep Research is Gemini's multi-step research agent. You ask a question; it plans, searches, reads, synthesizes, and delivers a report.
Upload a PDF, a set of docs, or a research paper. NotebookLM produces a two-host podcast conversation about the material.
A Space is a bookmarked, collaborative research context. Your sources, your prompts, your team — all persistent.
Everyone brags about million-token windows. Here is what you can actually do with one when you learn how Gemini 2.5 Pro handles long documents.
Every LLM hallucinates. Perplexity's Sonar family solves it by grounding answers in live web results with citations. Here is when to use Sonar instead of Claude or GPT.
Biology is full of pictures and big words. AI can label diagrams, simplify papers, and quiz you on systems.
History essays live or die by evidence. AI can help you find sources, organize arguments, and avoid weak claims.
Google's NotebookLM lets you upload textbooks, lectures, and notes, then chat with them. This is the most underrated study tool of 2026.
Lab reports follow a template. AI can help you structure and polish - but your observations and analysis must be yours.
Stats is 10 percent concepts and 90 percent careful arithmetic. AI is shockingly good at the arithmetic, which frees you to actually think about the concepts.
Perplexity gives you AI answers with source citations. Honest look at whether it beats ChatGPT with browsing and what the $20 Pro tier actually adds.
NotebookLM turns your documents into an AI tutor that only answers from your sources. Look at why its audio overviews went viral and where it still falls short.
When AI outputs get too long, too technical, or too fast for humans to check, how do you know it is doing the right thing? Scalable oversight is the research program trying to answer that.
A circuit is a small sub-network inside a big model that implements one specific behavior. Finding circuits is how researchers prove how a model does what it does.
arXiv is where AI research actually lives. Here is how to read it without drowning.
Most big AI papers appear at one of four conferences. Learn the map and you can navigate the field.
AI is a terrific tutor for dense papers — if you use it the right way.
Before LLMs-as-judges, researchers had hand-made metrics. They still matter — and still mislead.
P-value is one of the most abused numbers in research. Here is what it actually says — and what it does not. 'Model B is no better than model A.' 'The new prompt does not change user satisfaction.' A low p-value means the boring story would rarely produce data that looks like what you saw.
The most famous warning in statistics is also the most ignored. Here is how to actually tell them apart.
Bayes' rule is just 'update your belief with evidence.' It is shockingly useful.
Excel and Google Sheets hide a lot of complexity behind a pretty grid. Once you see what is really happening, you will never look at a spreadsheet the same way.
CSV is the plainest, ugliest, most universal data format. It has survived every trend because it does one thing well: it works everywhere.
Every column in a dataset has a type: number, text, date, boolean, or identifier. Mixing them up causes most beginner bugs.
Real datasets have holes. Blank cells, NaN, NULL, -999, and the dreaded empty string. Learning to see them is a core skill.
Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E all trace back to LAION, an open dataset of 5 billion image-text pairs. It changed AI, and started a legal storm.
When we say trillions of tokens, we mean it. Let's make these numbers feel real with comparisons you can actually picture.
Surveys consistently find data scientists spend 60 to 80 percent of their time cleaning data. Here is what that actually looks like.
If the same paragraph appears a million times in your training data, your model will memorize it. Deduplication quietly makes AI better.
The raw web is 99 percent garbage. Filtering it down to the 1 percent worth training on is one of the highest-leverage steps in modern AI.
The imitation game became famous, but most AI researchers now think it measures the wrong thing.