Unplugged in the age of AI
A talk, not a workshop: the only thing the audience does is hold a search sheet and put a hand up. The room runs a bigram model of The Cat in the Hat for five minutes, maps what it did onto the real vocabulary (tokens, parameters, distribution, sampling), sees the same model in grid form, and then watches three scales grow—context, training text, learned numbers—from the paper model to a frontier LLM, without pretending the two are the same kind of machine. It ends on the claim that you can’t build Claude, but twenty minutes of paper and hands in the air makes you harder to fool.
We gave it at ANU in August 2026, straight after Tim Bell’s introduction to CS Unplugged; the Bandura quote it opens with had been on his screen fifteen minutes earlier. The deck below keeps the quote as its own opener and drops the event-specific close; the deck as delivered is linked alongside it.
Running order
| Time | Beat | Slides |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 | the frame: understand, and believe you can | 1–4 |
| 3:00 | what you’ve just been given, then the recipe | 5–6 |
| 5:00 | run the room | 7 |
| 11:00 | what just happened; the whole book; the grid | 8–12 |
| 14:00 | what Claude does differently, at scale | 13–17 |
| 18:00 | back to Bandura, the claim, then the QR | 18–21 |
You will need
- one search sheet per attendee, sized to the head count: the ready-to-print
Cat in the Hat set holds 36 sheets (or A5 two-up), or
deal your own with
llms_unplugged sheets -i data/the-cat-in-the-hat.txt -n 2 --sheets <count> - the brief (page 1 of the PDF) on the lectern; it carries the worked example
- the deck’s annotation layer (⇧W on the board slide) for the generated text, and a scribe if you’d rather not write and talk
- a projector for the slides
Before you deliver
- don’t hand the sheets out early; they get read, and the “nobody here is holding a story” beat depends on the shuffle
- the numbers on the “between us we have the whole book” and scale slides are
for The Cat in the Hat at n=2; if you swap the corpus, rebuild them with
llms_unplugged buildand read the metadata block - the as-delivered deck closes on “come to tomorrow’s workshop”, which was for that event; the deck above ends on the QR instead
Using the slides
The slides run in your browser, and every slide carries full presenter notes—what to say, what to watch for, and how long each part should take. A few keys worth knowing:
- f toggles fullscreen—do this before you start presenting
- s opens the speaker view in a separate window, with the presenter notes, a timer, and a preview of the next slide (drag it to your laptop screen and put the slides on the projector)
- o shows an overview of all slides, handy for skipping ahead if you're running short on time