Show HN: Transformer Primitives – A visual explainer you can send to anyone

4 points by arzt 2 hours ago

I have had a few conversations in the past year with non-technical folks (traditional finance types, consultants) who asked for a simple explainer on how GPTs work. These people generally have the horsepower to grasp new concepts quickly but don't necessarily have the math background to dig in super deeply and want a stronger framework than "they predict words".

I had generally been pointing them to Karpathy, Illustrated Transformer, and other youtube content but I figured something more hands on without the math requirement might be better at explaining questions like "why matrix multiplication?".

I built this as a simple 60-70 minute interactive course with some demos I could send along to them. I've found it effective as the initial foray into understanding jargon and concepts before they graduate to Karpathy et al.

It's free, no signup required. I would love feedback on where it might lose a non-technical reader, and where someone who does this for a living thinks I have simplified past the point of being correct.

understandgpt.xyz