an interactive curriculum

The AI Iceberg

Everything the world currently calls "AI" sits on top of seventy years of older ideas, most of which still quietly run the software you use every day. This is that stack, dug through one layer at a time: hand-written logic at the surface, then models fitted from data, then networks, then depth, then generation, then agency at the bottom. Every demo here implements its algorithm from scratch and runs it live in your browser — nothing is precomputed, nothing is faked, and if you refresh the page it all happens again.

9 demoszero librarieszero build stepview the source of any page
01
Classical AI

Search and logic. A human writes the rules; the machine follows them exhaustively and can explain every step.

the waterline. Below this point nobody writes the rules any more — the machine derives them from data, and gets steadily better at things it cannot explain.

02
Machine Learning

Fit a model to examples. Still the most commercially valuable layer of the whole iceberg.

03
Neural Networks

Stacked layers of weighted sums, trained by the chain rule. Flexible, and permanently unable to explain themselves.

04
Deep Learning

The same mathematics, stacked deeper and fed more data. "Deep" has never meant anything more exotic than that.

05
Generative AI

Predict the next token, then do it again. The whole family, from lookup tables to frontier models.

06
Agentic AI

A model placed inside a loop, with tools. The difference between answering and acting.

About this build

Every page is a single HTML file with its CSS and JavaScript inline — no frameworks, no CDN, no bundler, no dependencies of any kind. Each algorithm is implemented from scratch in plain JavaScript and executes in your browser while you watch: the classifier really is fitted on page load, the boosted trees really are grown one stump at a time, the network really does backpropagate. Where a Python library has no browser equivalent, the page says so in a dashed box and names what it substituted and what that costs. The two pages that talk to a language model call the Anthropic API directly and handle failure by saying so rather than by inventing an answer. Nothing is stored on your device — refresh and every demo starts from zero.