013 Labs — Foundations
Start here.
Plain-language explanations of what AI actually is, the terms nobody defines well, and how it applies to a real business — free, honest, and updated as the curriculum grows. No hype, no acronym soup.
What "AI" Actually Means When People Say It
The word "AI" has stopped meaning anything specific, which is exactly the problem. It gets used for the spam filter in your email, the...
Start hereWhat People Mean When They Say "AI" — And What's Actually Happening Underneath
Somewhere in the last few years, "AI" stopped meaning a broad field of computer science and started meaning "the chatbot." Someone says...
Start hereBeyond Chat: The Four Other Ways Your Business Can Actually Use AI
When most business owners hear "use AI," they picture a chat box. You type a question, it types back an answer, you copy the good parts...
Start hereWhat You're Actually Paying For When You Upgrade Your AI Subscription
A business owner asked me recently whether they should pay for ChatGPT or Claude, or just stick with the free version. It's a fair...
Go deeperWhat an AI "Agent" Actually Is, and How It's Different From a Chatbot
People throw the word "agent" around now like it names some new species of AI, a step up from the chatbot you've already used. It doesn't....
Go deeperWhat Is a "Harness"? The Part of AI Tools Nobody Explains
When people say "the AI" is bad at something, or surprisingly good at something else, they're usually talking about two different things at...
Go deeperHow an AI Assistant Actually Checks Your Calendar (and What MCP Has to Do With It)
Ask an AI assistant "what's on my calendar tomorrow," and one of two very different things can happen. In one version, the assistant has...
Go deeperAutomation, Workflow, or Agent: Picking the Right One for Your Business
People say "we're automating this" and "we're building an agent for that" like the two things are interchangeable. They're not, and the...
Go deeperWhat a Context Window Is, and Why It Quietly Controls What Your AI Can Do
I hear a version of the same complaint from almost every business owner who's tried to get real use out of ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini: it...
Go deeperRAG: How to Get an AI to Answer From Your Own Business Documents, Not Just Its Training Data
A client of mine set up an AI chatbot on their website last year. It looked great in the demo. Then a real customer asked it a question...
Go furtherWhat an API Actually Is (and Why It's How Most Business AI Actually Gets Built)
"API" gets thrown around in every AI pitch deck and every vendor call, usually with the assumption that everyone in the room already knows what it...
Go furtherAI Pricing Models Explained: Subscriptions, Per-Token, and Per-Seat
A client called me last month holding two invoices side by side, genuinely confused about why one product cost twenty dollars a month per person...
Go furtherWhat a Token Actually Costs: The Real Math Behind Your AI Bill
A client called me last month holding two invoices from two different chatbot pilots, both running what he assumed was "the same AI," and one was...
Go furtherRate Limits, Usage Caps, and Quotas: Why Your AI Tool Suddenly Slows Down or Stops
A client of mine built a chatbot to answer customer questions on his e-commerce site. Worked beautifully in testing. Then he sent a promotional...
Go furtherOpen-Weight vs. Closed Models: What "Open Source AI" Actually Means
A business owner told me recently that he wanted to "switch to the open source model" because his team had heard it was free and just as good as...
Go furtherCloud AI vs. Self-Hosting: What Actually Changes When You Run a Model Yourself
A business owner asked me last month whether they should just "run their own AI" instead of paying for ChatGPT or Claude every month. He'd read...
Go furtherWhat "Local AI" Means and When You'd Actually Want It
A client asked me last month whether he should be running AI "locally" instead of using ChatGPT or Claude through a browser. He'd heard the phrase...
Go furtherThe AI Coding Assistant Landscape: What Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and the Rest Actually Do Differently
A client of mine was on a call with a contractor last month, and the contractor said something like, "we're running this through Claude Code...
Go furtherHow AI Models Get Scored: What Benchmarks and Leaderboards Actually Measure
A benchmark sounds like something out of a research lab, but strip away the mystique and it's a pretty ordinary thing. Someone writes a fixed set...
Go furtherChoosing the Right Model for the Job: A Practical Framework, Not a Leaderboard
Every few weeks a client sends me a screenshot of some leaderboard and asks whether they should switch. A new model dropped, it's on top of some...
Go furtherSmall Models vs. Large Models: Why Bigger Isn't Always Better
Every business owner I talk to eventually asks me some version of the same question: which AI model should I use? Underneath that question is...
Go furtherHow to Evaluate an AI Vendor's Claims: A Skeptic's Checklist
I sit in a lot of vendor demos with clients now, and they all have the same shape. A slide with a logo that looks vaguely futuristic, a phrase like...
Go furtherPrompt Engineering Is Mostly Dead; Here's What Replaced It
A couple of years ago I spent real time collecting "magic phrases." Tell the model it's an expert with twenty years of experience. Tell it to think...
Go furtherFine-Tuning vs. Prompting vs. RAG: Three Different Ways to Teach a Model Your Business
Every few weeks a business owner asks me some version of the same question: "Can we just fine-tune the AI on our own data so it really knows us?"...
Go furtherWhat Fine-Tuning a Model Actually Involves, and When You Actually Need It
Every few months a client says the phrase like it's a magic word: "we probably just need to fine-tune a model." Usually they've read it in a vendor...
Go furtherWhat "Hallucination" Actually Means, and Why It Isn't Going Away
A client of mine once asked an AI assistant to summarize a vendor contract and pull out the termination clause. It came back fast, well-formatted,...
Go furtherMultimodal AI: What It Means When a Model Can See, Hear, and Read
A client sent me a picture of a handwritten delivery note last month, half the ink smudged, and asked if there was any way to get it into her...
Go furtherWhat Guardrails and Safety Filters Actually Do (and Where They Fail)
A woman who runs a life insurance agency called me last month confused about her new customer service chatbot. A prospective client had asked a...
Go furtherWhat Actually Happens to Your Data When You Use an AI Tool
A client asked me something last month that I get asked constantly, in one form or another: "If I paste our customer list into ChatGPT to help me...
Go furtherPicking Your First AI Project: Where Small Businesses Actually Get the Best Return
Every business owner I talk to eventually asks me the same question: what should we actually build first? And almost every one of them has a...