LLMs Unplugged: A tech-free guide to understanding (and teaching) AI

Join the ANU Cybernetics team in an ANU-wide session of the LLMs Unplugged workshop.

No pre-reading or prior technical knowledge is required—just bring your curiosity about how information theory shapes our understanding of human and technological communication.

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However, if you'd like to get a head start on some of the ideas we'll be covering (or if you're just the curious type and you like reading interesting stuff) here are a few free resources.

Andrey Markov & Claude Shannon Counted Letters to Build the First Language-Generation Models covers some of the historical background. https://spectrum.ieee.org/andrey-markov-and-claude-shannon-built-the-first-language-generation-models

The Dummy's Guide to Modern LLM Sampling covers the "sampling" part of the process in detail, but also has some helpful definitions at the top. https://rentry.co/samplers

Brendan O'Conner's slides on N-Gram Language Models are interesting if you want to go further with the maths (although this is much more maths than we'll use - this session really is for everyone).

With your newly constructed language model, in the final part of this workshop you'll use it to participate in a poetry slam - dramatic readings of newly-generated language model poetry. Your participation in this activity is your completion activity.