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EP. 149 · 14.07.2026 · 59:48

A PRIMER ON LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS

with Andrej Karpathy

LLMFundamentalsEducationPretrainingAlignment59:48

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EPISODE BRIEF — EP. 149 · A PRIMER ON LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS
Guest: Andrej Karpathy · Published: 14.07.2026 · Duration: 59:48

【OVERVIEW】
The clearest one-hour explanation of how large language models actually work: pretraining and finetuning, what the weights really are, scaling laws, tool use, and the emerging security surface of models that read untrusted text.

【KEY TAKEAWAYS】
1. What a language model actually is
2. Pretraining, finetuning and the assistant
3. Scaling laws and the LLM operating system
4. Jailbreaks, prompt injection and model security

【CHAPTERS】
00:00 — What a language model actually is
10:00 — Pretraining, finetuning and the assistant
25:00 — Scaling laws and the LLM operating system
42:00 — Jailbreaks, prompt injection and model security

【TOPICS】LLM · Fundamentals · Education · Pretraining · Alignment

【WATCH】https://thedaopod.com/episodes/ep-149-intro-to-large-language-models

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ABOUT THIS EPISODE

THE CONVERSATION

The clearest one-hour explanation of how large language models actually work: pretraining and finetuning, what the weights really are, scaling laws, tool use, and the emerging security surface of models that read untrusted text.

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A PRIMER ON LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS

thedaopod.com

EP. 149 · A PRIMER ON LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS

The clearest one-hour explanation of how large language models actually work: pretraining and finetuning, what the weights really are, scaling laws, tool use, and the emerging security surface of models that read untrusted text.

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CHAPTERS

TIMELINE

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GUESTS

ON THE ROUNDTABLE

A
ANDREJ KARPATHY

Founding member, OpenAI · Former Director of AI, Tesla

A founding member of OpenAI and former Director of AI at Tesla. His long-form lectures are widely regarded as the best available introduction to how modern language models are trained and deployed.

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0:00 · What a language model actually is

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