Demystifying AI: Separating Architecture from the Hype

SIM industry event · May 2026 · co-presented with Ken Garfinkel (CIO, Broan-NuTone)

In 75 minutes, attendees go from the simplest possible machine-learning model to the architectural frontier — and run the demos themselves.

SIM industry event · May 2026 · co-presented with Ken Garfinkel (CIO, Broan-NuTone)

In 75 minutes, attendees go from the simplest possible machine-learning model to the architectural frontier — and run the demos themselves. The whole arc is built to turn “AI feels like magic” into “oh, that’s all it is.”

The demos

The talk is built around two hands-on labs the audience runs live. Both live in the Labs library and are reusable beyond this event:

Act 1 — Mine the Room

Watch a model learn from your data. Call out ten numbers and watch it search them for the pattern — the simplest possible model, and the foundation everything else is built on. CPU-only, ~30 seconds to render.

Act 3 — nanoGPT

Train a transformer from scratch in ~10 minutes on free cloud hardware. Same procedure that built GPT-4, 200,000× smaller. Switch the training data from Shakespeare to Mark Twain and a completely different writer comes out — proof that the architecture is general and the data is what gives a model its voice. Needs the free T4 GPU runtime.