This workshop guides participants through the basics of an LLM setup and the specific way that models are trained to "reason." A short history of this process accompanies a simple tutorial run locally on participants' machines. The goal is to see what is not just "next token prediction," but instead a more open-ended exploration of context and rules in modern models. No coding experience of any kind is required.
Leif Weatherby is founding director of the Digital Theory Lab and Professor of German at New York University. His scholarship focuses on literary theory, digital culture, and the history of science, with particular attention to the philosophical foundations of computing and AI.
He is the author of Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx (Fordham, 2016) and, most recently, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), which argues that large language models don't simulate cognition but instead generate culture. His writing has appeared in the The New York Times, Critical Inquiry, and The Point Magazine. He is currently a fellow of the Open Society Foundations.
