A co-learner, sharing notes.

I am Pradeep Parmar. I have spent more than twenty years in enterprise technology, seventeen of them at Akamai, making things work at scale. Beyond the Chatbot is the name of everything I write about AI. One Layer Deeper is this notebook: the part of it that explains how AI actually works, one layer below the surface.

It exists because the fundamentals of AI are not that complicated, but they are being made to look complicated, and very little of what gets written helps anyone actually understand. The notebook is written for anyone who really wants to: companies, executives, engineers, developers, individuals.

How the notes are written

I am not an expert in AI. I am learning. Over the past year I went back to being a student, through self-study and a professional certificate, and that journey shaped how I think about all of this. What I learn, I pass forward.

Each note follows the same rules. It opens with a question, not a warning. It explains one mechanism, with an analogy you can carry. It says why that mechanism matters for someone deciding how to use AI, and it says what is still uncertain. It credits the people whose work it draws on. And it tests what it teaches: every note has a practical, and wherever I can I run it myself and record what I found, even when the result is boring. Anyone who has worked with me has heard this more than once. Do a practical to back the theory.

Every note ends with a short section called one layer deeper, for readers who want the precise term, the mechanism named exactly, and somewhere to read further.

The figure in the drawings

The character with the notebook who appears in every drawing is the learner. He never explains anything. He only looks, and writes down what he noticed. The single handwritten line under each drawing is his.

that's me, most days.

Where this is going

The notebook is kept in public and grows one note at a time. When a section is complete, its notes are gathered into a part of a book you can download from here. So this is a book being written in the open: the notebook carries the parts that keep changing, and the book will say honestly that it is a snapshot of a living set of notes.