A co-learner, sharing notes.

I am Pradeep Parmar. I have spent more than twenty years in enterprise technology, seventeen of them at Akamai, making things work at scale. For the past year I have been writing on LinkedIn, under the name Beyond the Chatbot, about what AI does to organisations.

Somewhere along the way, something started to bother me. The fundamentals of AI are not that complicated. But they are being made to look complicated, by a weekly wave of articles that skew the concepts, add a buzzword, and repeat each other. Very little of it helps anyone actually understand.

One Layer Deeper is my answer to that. Every week, one thing about how AI actually works, one layer below the surface, explained in plain language. It is written for anyone who really wants to understand: companies, executives, engineers, developers, individuals.

How it is written

I am not an expert in AI. I am learning. Over the past year I went back to being a student, through self-study and a professional certificate, and that journey shaped how I think about all of this. What I learn, I pass forward. That is just how I have always done things.

So each note follows a few rules. It opens with a question, not a warning. It explains one mechanism, with an analogy you can carry. It says why that mechanism matters for someone deciding how to use AI, and it says what is still uncertain. It credits the people whose work it draws on. And it tests what it teaches: wherever I can, I run the experiment myself and report what I found, even when the result is boring. Anyone who has worked with me has heard this more than once. Do a practical to back the theory.

Every note ends with a short section called one layer deeper, for readers who want the precise term, the mechanism named exactly, and somewhere to read further.

The figure in the drawings

The character with the notebook who appears in every diagram is the learner. He never explains anything. He only looks, and writes down what he noticed. The single handwritten line under each drawing is his.

that's me, most days.

Where this is going

The notes are collected as they are written. When an arc closes, its notes become a part of a book you can download, so the series is a book being written in public, one Wednesday at a time. The website carries the parts that keep changing; the book will say honestly that it is a snapshot of a living set of notes.