Ian Bigford
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The Gen AI Book: History to Now

3/8/2025
Repo Website

Overview

Live site: genaibook.fyi

A free, interactive book about Generative AI and agents. I built it for people who want to actually understand what's going on under the hood — not just use the tools, but reason about them.

Why I built this

I came to learn that a lot of people still haven't used an LLM, and honestly that didn't surprise me. The space is moving crazy fast, it's full of nerdery, doomer narratives, and everything in between. Most of the existing material is either too academic or too shallow — research papers on one end, Twitter threads on the other.

So I wanted to try to make it approachable from first principles. The goal is to take someone from "LLMs feel like magic" to "I can reason about tokens, attention, context, and agents" — and to do it without the hype. Bring curiosity, leave with working mental models.

What's inside

The book walks through five parts:

  • Foundations — what models are optimizing, how representations form
  • Transformers — attention, tokens, scaling, why it all works so well
  • LLM mechanics — tokenization, prompting, context windows, sampling
  • Agents — tools, planning, memory, evaluation; MCP, Google ADK, and friends
  • Practice — shipping, risks, and responsible use that survives contact with reality

Each page stands on its own but builds toward a bigger picture. Short sections, minimal hand-waving, lots of visuals, and links out to code, papers, and real systems so you can keep going.

Interactive visualizations

This is the part I'm most proud of. Instead of static diagrams, you can poke at the visualizations and watch things move — neural nets building representations, attention maps lighting up, token flows through residual streams, agents calling tools. The goal is to form the "aha" that actually sticks, not just read about it.

The stack

  • Frontend: React 19, Vite, Tailwind, Framer Motion
  • Visualizations: Custom SVG components for all the interactive pieces
  • Icons: Lucide React