3Blue1Brown is Grant Sanderson’s much-loved YouTube channel that explains maths through animation. Its neural networks series explains, in a handful of short videos, what a neural network is and how it learns.
What’s in it? Neurons and layers, gradient descent, backpropagation and, in later chapters, the Transformer and attention behind large language models.
Why we recommend it: It isn’t a university course, but it may be the best starting point. It shows the picture before the formulas, so when you later move on to courses like CS229 or CS231n you know what you’re looking for. If you’ve read our Transformer post, the chapters on attention are a nice follow-up.
Who is it for? High-school maths is enough. Everyone, including people who know nothing about AI.
- Series page: 3Blue1Brown, Neural Networks