The Loop  ·  Issue N°017

The Loop

A field journal of the AI frontier — for engineers who ship.

The Lab Bench

Toys, demos, and small instruments — for when reading about a thing isn't quite enough.

  1. Exp 001explainer

    How a sentence becomes tokens

    Type something. Watch a real GPT tokenizer chop it into the units the model actually sees.

    #tokenization#bpe#gpt-4#gpt-4o

  2. Exp 002explainer

    Temperature and top-p, visibly

    Move the dials. Watch a probability distribution collapse, flatten, or get its tail trimmed off.

    #sampling#temperature#top-p#softmax

  3. Exp 003tool

    What does this prompt actually cost?

    Paste a prompt, pick a model, slide the cache-hit rate. See per-call, per-day, and per-month cost.

    #pricing#caching#claude#gpt#gemini

  4. Exp 004game

    Tokens per second

    A clicker game. Start with a laptop CPU, grind to frontier-lab hardware, unlock bigger models as you go.

    #game#clicker#idle

  5. Exp 005explainer

    How far should the model think?

    A single math problem at rising reasoning budgets — watch accuracy climb, then plateau into elaboration.

    #reasoning#thinking#budget#o1#extended-thinking

  6. Exp 006explainer

    Neural language vs a Markov chain

    Train a word-level n-gram in your browser on the fly. See how badly it loses to a real model on the same prompt.

    #language-models#markov#n-gram#history

  7. Exp 007explainer

    What each token looks at

    Click a token. See which earlier tokens it attends to, as a row of weighted bars.

    #transformers#attention#interpretability

  8. Exp 008explainer

    Words in space

    A hand-placed 2D layout of 80 AI-industry words. Click any to find its nearest neighbors.

    #embeddings#vectors#rag#semantic-search

  9. Exp 009game

    The injection arena

    Five levels of defensive assistants, each guarding a secret. Your job is to extract it. Fewer attempts = higher rank.

    #security#prompt-injection#jailbreak#game

  10. Exp 010game

    AI or human?

    Twenty short snippets. Half written by models. Classify each. Reveal the tells at the end.

    #detection#writing#ai-output#game

  11. Exp 011game

    Context Tetris

    Messages drop every few seconds into a fixed 1000-token context window. Keep what matters, evict the noise.

    #context-window#rag#game

  12. Exp 012game

    Magnet flip

    Your cursor is a magnet. North pulls coins in. North also pulls iron mites in.

    #game#physics#reflex

These pages are part of The Loop. Same paper, slightly different ink — the bench is where the writing gets to be a thing you can move around with your hands.