Are you an entry level dev with zero clue how LLMs worked? Here’s a mental model to understand how it actually works and where it is heading.

You can learn all of this in 1 year. No PhD. Just curiosity, bookmarks, and late nights.

Start now.

Let’s start at the beginning

Text → Tokens → Embeddings

Text becomes tokens. Tokens become embeddings. Suddenly, you’re just a floating-point number drifting in 4D space. Vibe accordingly.

Positional Embeddings

• Absolute: “I am position 5.”
• RoPE: “I am a sine wave.”
• Alibi: “I scale attention by distance like a hater.”

Models need position signals. Otherwise, they just see a bag of numbers.

https://x.com/aaditsh/status/1972405454971318662

Attention Is All You Need

• Self-attention: “Who am I allowed to pay attention to?”
• Multi-head: “What if I do that 8 times in parallel?”
• QKV: query, key, value. Looks like a crypto scam, but it’s the core of intelligence.