// QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH · AI · MARKETS

Signal from noise.

Notes on AI, quantitative trading and financial technology — written from the trenches, not the sidelines.

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2026.08.06 // LLM FOR DUMMIES // 7 MIN

LLM for Dummies #4 — Training: How Guessing the Next Word Buys You a Mind

We have the machine. Now, why are its trillion numbers right? Because of one absurdly simple game played ten trillion times: hide the next token, guess it, measure the surprise, adjust. This part explains why that game forces a model to learn facts, grammar and a bit of reasoning — and what a loss curve really measures.

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2026.07.30 // LLM FOR DUMMIES // 9 MIN

LLM for Dummies #3 — Attention: How Words Learn to Look at Each Other

Parts 1 and 2 turned text into lonely points in space. Attention is the mechanism that lets every token look at every other token and decide whom to listen to — the idea the Transformer is named after, and the reason long context windows cost quadratic money.

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