A model’s cutoff is not a freshness guarantee
A training cutoff is a warning about built-in knowledge, not a guarantee about every answer. Use current sources and check both the facts and the conclusion.
Beginner AI
AI literacy
How to get a straight answer out of a chatbot
Clear requests can improve AI answers, but do not eliminate errors. Six habits for defining the task, supplying evidence and checking what comes back.
Beginner AI
Research with AI without inventing sources
Grounding makes AI research easier to verify, but cannot guarantee true citations. Retrieve sources, inspect quotations and check the claims that matter.
Intermediate AI
Getting a model to say “I don’t know”
AI can sound certain while being wrong. Make uncertainty explicit, allow abstention and check whether the evidence supports the answer.
Intermediate AI
What a context window actually is
A context window is a request budget, not perfect recall. How history, output limits, caching and product memory affect what an assistant can use.
Beginner AI
Tokens, and why your bill is not about words
Token counts depend on the model and the actual request. Learn to estimate input, caching, reasoning, and output costs without treating words as a precise measure.
Beginner AI
What “agentic” actually means
The word is doing too much work. Here is the distinction that matters, and the four questions that tell you what you are actually being sold.
Beginner AI
Why two people get different answers from the same model
Same-looking requests can differ in context, tools, settings or generation. How to compare answers without guessing which cause dominates.
Beginner AI
When not to use AI
The most useful skill with these tools is recognizing the cases where they are the wrong answer — and several of them look like ideal candidates.
Master AI