For professionals
INFO
These resources are under active development. If there’s something you’d like to see, please get in touch.
TIP
If you’re thinking that what you really want is for the LLMs Unplugged team to come and deliver a workshop to your team/organisation then you’re in luck—that’s one of the things we do here at the School of Cybernetics. Drop us a line and to discuss how we can make it happen.
Honestly, this stuff is just as fun as a Christmas party/team bonding activity, but the learning is very real. Learning can be fun.
Why hands-on learning for professionals?
You don’t need to be a data scientist to understand how LLMs work. But if you’re making decisions about AI tools, leading teams that use them, or trying to cut through vendor hype, having a concrete mental model matters.
This workshop gives you that model through direct experience. You’ll build a simple language model by hand—counting patterns in text, rolling dice to generate new text, seeing where it works and where it fails. No programming required.
The result? You’ll understand what’s actually happening when you type a prompt into ChatGPT, why these tools sometimes produce nonsense, and what the fundamental limitations are. You’ll be able to have informed conversations about AI adoption and help your team use these tools more effectively.
Suggested ways in
Every organisation is different, so which lessons you choose to learn will depend on your specific needs and goals. We suggest you start with the Fundamentals, and then choose-your-own adventure from there.
A few more facilitation tips:
mixed technical groups: pair technical and non-technical participants for the training step—different perspectives often surface useful insights
sceptics: the hands-on format works well for sceptics because it’s concrete—you’re not asking anyone to believe claims about AI, you’re showing them how patterns in text become generated output
follow-up: after the workshop, participants often want to explore the full lesson library—send them the link and let them go deeper on topics that interest them