Free Community Workshop · San Geronimo

AI for Everyone

Honest talk about what this actually is. Then you'll use it with your own hands.

Saturday, June 6 · 10:30 to 12 Free

Who I am

I'm Aaron. I live up the roadai likes to make one key word a different color for emphasis.

I spent 12 years leading community teams at technology companies.
Now I help people and businesses actually use AI. That work is The Eel Seminar.
I also make AI Hot Takes, a short video show about what's new in AI.

First, let's meet

Quick introductions.

Your name
How you feel about AIOne honest word is plenty. Curious, nervous, skeptical, tired of hearing about it.

I'll go first.

The deal

You'll leave having tried AI.

My goal is for you to do it yourself.
No “dumb” questions
Skeptics welcome

This is a conversation, not a lecture. I'll ask, you jump in.

The plan

The next 90 minutes.

01What AI actually is
02You try it yourself Beginner: try an AI appAdvanced: build an AI app or website
03Open discussion and share

I'd love to hear from you

What is artificial intelligence?

There's no right answer here. The world's experts wouldn't give you the same one.

My answer

A computer that knows everything* and can hold a conversation.

Recognizing a face. Understanding speech. Writing. Deciding.

*It doesn't really know everything. We'll get to that.

A real example

It writes your cover letter.

The job description + Your résumé ↓ A cover letter that uses your experience to answer what the job asks for

It reads both, understands both, and combines them. Seconds, not an hour.

Over to you

What would you want AI to do for you?

Any ideas for what it might be good at? Or something you'd love it to do for you?

What's different about AI

Now it can talk.

That's the one thing that changed. Google could always point you to things other people wrote. Now AI reads all of it and gives you the answer instead.

It's not alive and it's not thinking. It's a pattern machine that got shockingly good.

Let's try one

Let me show you, live.

We'll take something you just said and do it together, right here on my screen.

›Help me write a firm but kind email to my landlord about the heater that's been broken a week.

Quick question

How do you think I built all of this?

The website. The slides. What work did I actually have to do?

Case in point

I built this deck by talking to it.

›Make each point appear one at a time when I click, and add a question for the room at the end.

I typed plain English, no code at all, and got these exact slides.

The actual work

Actual things I said to my computer.

›Make a landing page for an AI workshop in San Geronimo Valley, with nature all around.

›Add little animated forest creatures that run across the slides.

›Put it all into a clickable presentation.

I described what I wanted. It built each piece.

A quick glossary

AI terms to know.

LLMThe chat assistants. Stands for Large Language Model.
PromptJust what you type to it.
HallucinateWhen it confidently makes something up.
AgentWhen it doesn't just talk, it goes and does the task for you.
ModelThe underlying brain. Claude, GPT, and Gemini are models.

What is an LLM

The thing behind ChatGPT is an LLM.

Large.It read almost everything humans have written.

Language.Words are its whole world.

Model.A prediction machine.

What it actually does

Autocomplete that went to college.

It predicts the next word. Then the next. Same idea as your phone guessing your next text, just vastly more capable.

How it works

It's all pattern recognition.

1

See examples

It studied billions of sentences, photos, and faces.

2

Find the pattern

It learns what usually follows what.

3

Predict

Given something new, it guesses the most likely next piece.

The honest part

It can make things up, confidently.

Treat it like a brilliant intern who sometimes bluffs
Don't trust it where being wrong matters and you can't check
The unlock: you just talk to it in plain EnglishIf you can describe it, you can use it. That's the whole skill.

Before we move on

Any questions so far?

Anything about large language models before we go to the next topic?

What are agents

An LLM talks. An agent does.

An agent takes actions for you. It uses tools, browses the web, fills forms, sends, books, builds.

Plot twist

And you've been using it for years.

Your camera finding faces in a photoThose little yellow boxes around a face. It's seen millions of faces, so it knows one when it sees it.
Netflix guessing what you'll watch nextIt knows every show you've watched, which ones share themes, and what similar viewers loved.
Your email catching spamIt's learned what spam tends to look like, reads each message, and makes its best guess.

The lay of the land

The tools people actually use.

Claude, ChatGPT & GeminiThe assistants you chat with. All three do the same core thing. Pick one and get comfortable.
LovableDescribe a website in plain English and it builds it. You used this today.
GranolaSits quietly in your meetings and writes the notes for you.
LindyAn AI assistant you can text to run tasks, reminders, and follow-ups.

It's bigger than chat

It's not just typing back and forth.

Make images from a sentenceMidjourney, DALL·E, or the one built right into ChatGPT.
Make short videos from a sentenceThe newest frontier. Tools like Sora and Runway.
Voice and musicNarrate a script, clone a voice, generate a whole song.

Over to you