howaiworks.io is a free, open-source learning platform where you experience how modern AI actually works instead of reading about it. Each lesson is a hands-on demo: type a sentence and watch GPT’s real tokenizer split it into tokens, explore a map of word embeddings organized by meaning, trace how a transformer’s attention mechanism figures out what “it” refers to, and run a real language model entirely inside your browser.
The lessons build on each other in the same order an AI system processes language: first the history of how we got here, then tokenization (how text becomes numbers), embeddings (how numbers capture meaning), attention (how models weigh context), and finally inference (where and how models actually run).
The lessons are designed for university students taking their first AI or NLP course, teachers looking for live demos to use in class, self-taught developers who want intuition to go with the APIs they use, and anyone curious about what is really happening inside ChatGPT, Claude, and other large language models. No math background or programming experience is required to start — every concept is something you can see and manipulate directly.
howaiworks.io is free and open source (GitHub), built by Matt Feroz.