LLMs Unplugged at the ACDICT L&T Forum
Today I’m running an LLMs Unplugged session at the ACDICT Learning & Teaching Forum. It’s a hands-on, pen-paper-and-dice walk through how a language model actually works—you build a bigram model by hand, generate new text from it by rolling dice, and then bolt on a couple of the ideas (sycophancy, tool use) that turn up in the real systems.
The session is mostly in-person, but a few people are joining online, and this post is for them.
Following along online
The slides are here: LLMs Unplugged @ ACDICT.
I’ll be talking mostly to the people in the room, so the online experience will be a bit fly-on-the-wall—I won’t be watching the chat closely while I present. But if you’re keen, you can genuinely do the whole thing yourself as we go; it’s all analogue. You’ll need:
- a printed grid template (or any grid paper—even hand-drawn is fine)
- a book to use as training data—a kids’ book is ideal (short sentences, small vocabulary), but anything with text will do
- a die, or a dice-rolling app, for the generation step
- and, for the sycophancy section near the end, the sycophancy training text to tally into your grid
Work through it at your own pace. Treat it as choose-your-own-adventure: follow the steps as we go and you’ll come out the other side having built and run your own language model by hand, no computer required.
If you get stuck, or want to go deeper afterwards, the full set of lessons covers everything here in more detail.