How LLMs Actually Work

About

Most people use AI tools daily without understanding what's actually happening under the hood. This gap creates real problems: over-trust, under-use, and poor tool choices. In this workshop, learners will build a working mental model of how LLMs generate outputs, where their knowledge comes from, what "temperature" and "context windows" actually mean in practice, and why the same prompt produces different answers across Claude, Gemini etc. Using a guided comparative output exercise, participants will run identical prompts across multiple models and analyze the differences. The session closes with a practical triage framework for choosing between models and genAI tools based on the work in front of them. This workshop is presented in partnership with IBM. Workshop participants will gain access to IBM's Generative AI Essentials credential after attending this session.