About

Lin Clark is an independent researcher and educator, as well as the creator of Code Cartoons. With a career focused on developer tools and web standards, she has participated in numerous open web projects, from data in HTML to JavaScript and WebAssembly. She was a core module maintainer for Drupal, one of the first employees at npm, and for 7 years, she was part of the WebAssembly team at Mozilla, helping to drive the WebAssembly ecosystem. Lin believes in the mantra: assume zero knowledge and infinite intelligence. Whether she's explaining WebAssembly with a video game-style skill tree or the inner workings of React using characters from The IT Crowd, her talks make learning complex technologies feel like a game.

Session

Lin Clark

How the Heck Did the Machine Learn That?! A cartoon intro to machine learning and LLMs.

Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we work and the way our societies function. Whether these changes are good or bad (or a little bit of both), it is important for everyone to understand how AI works so we can all help make decisions about the direction it should go. In this talk, you’ll learn the basics of how machines learn. You’ll learn what people mean when they talk about “open-weights models,” or why that Feature Engineer job title might not mean what you think, along with lots of other jargon and buzzwords to help you engage with conversations about AI and where it is headed.