Edition 11.0 — The foundations edition. Every other page here tells you how to operate the tools; this one explains what is happening inside them, using the domain people find most magical. Sound is already numbers — 44,100 of them a second — and the whole breakthrough was compressing that into a few hundred learned symbols a second, short enough for a machine built to finish sentences to finish a song instead. Then the interesting part: the same three-step recipe went and conquered proteins, robot motion and the weather, which is the actual event of the last few years. Shipped with an interactive lab that runs the same pipeline across six alphabets, and with the parts most retellings get wrong kept in — including five claims from my own first draft that failed verification.

The foundations edition. Every other page here tells you how to operate the tools; this one explains what is happening inside them, using the domain people find most magical. Sound is already numbers — 44,100 of them a second — and the whole breakthrough was compressing that into a few hundred learned symbols a second, short enough for a machine built to finish sentences to finish a song instead.…