Blog Series

From Shannon to Transformers: The Foundations of Modern AI

Before transformers, there was a long journey of ideas that shaped how machines learn, process information, and understand language. This series explores the foundational papers and breakthroughs behind modern AI, from Claude Shannon's experiments with English letters, bigrams, and information theory to statistical language models, neural networks, and the ideas that eventually led to transformers. We'll work through the original papers step by step, unpack the mathematics intuitively, and reconstruct the key ideas through examples and experiments. The goal isn't just to understand what these papers say, but to discover why these ideas mattered and how they connect to the AI systems we build today.