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Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by prideout on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @04:54PM (#50358746)
My favorite little book is François Fleuret's: The Little Book of Deep Learning https://fleuret.org/francois/lbdl.html
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by arcanemachiner on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @05:04PM (#50358899)
I love how that site offers a phone-formatted PDF as an option. How thoughtful!
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by dominotw on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:32PM (#50359681)
i got duo to increase my reading.
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by deskamess on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:27PM (#50360123)
Is it working out well for tech pdf's and books? Once I saw the form factor I realized it would be better than an iPad (less heavy, better battery) and that is the use case I am looking at. Might wait till v2.
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by y1n0 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:37PM (#50360183)
[delayed]
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by y1n0 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:33PM (#50360166)
[delayed]
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by qifzer on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:52PM (#50359862)
You may enjoy the reflow feature on Koreader. It fits a pdfs content into a screenwidth single column layout. That text is also zoomable.
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by msdz on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @11:55PM (#50361636)
Does it work on scanned (non-“digital”) PDFs as well? That has been my biggest pain point so far. Haven’t tried Koreader yet.
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by qifzer on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @11:13AM (#50367680)
I have found that it works surprisingly well on PDFs ripped from the Internet Archive. These PDFs tend to be OCR'd scanned copies of the book. I doubt that it would work if the text is not selectable at all.
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by CamperBob2 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @05:19PM (#50359059)
It's a nice treatment of the subject, but I wish he would post a conventionally-formatted .PDF that puts every on a full sheet of standard printer paper.
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by bscphil on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @05:37PM (#50359233)
I immediately wanted the same thing, so I made it. The book is licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License, so here you go.

https://cdn.filepost.dev/file/filepost/uploads/15/1578f21219...

Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by CamperBob2 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:01PM (#50359444)
Thanks!
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by rahimnathwani on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:27PM (#50360497)
Thanks.

But fyi for others this is one version behind and missing these updates:

  V1.3 (May 12, 2026)
  Many typos and phrasing fixes with the help of LLMs.
  Section 3.8. Added a section about large-scale training
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by bscphil on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:50PM (#50360646)
Oh, that's unfortunate! I made it from the A5 version on the site which I downloaded right before making my post. Looks like the author hasn't updated that one.
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by rahimnathwani on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:57PM (#50360694)
I just emailed him. Fingers crossed.
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by joe_the_user on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:52PM (#50359863)
I'd note that the Fleuret books gives the foundation for basic deep learning whereas the OP seems to give the necessary foundations for Transformers and related machinery. These later addition what is now "AI" are in total at least as complicated as the original deep learning concepts. Not that just learning basic neural networks but the two book don't appear to cover the same ground.
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by wh306 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:11PM (#50360002)
Only had a quick skim, but looks like the content of this book has very little to do with transformers. Might be more relevant for diffusion models (image/video generation) though.
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by joe_the_user on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @12:57AM (#50361925)
Gee, I think you're right. But it's definitely a leap beyond what was deep learning a while back.
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by SwtCyber on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @05:26AM (#50363582)
The funny part is that these two worlds (diffusion and transformers) are starting to merge now - for example, in DiT , where transformer architecture is used for noise prediction. So the foundation from this book will still come in handy
Re:The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitiv... by brcmthrowaway on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:22PM (#50360096)
My full stack JS jockey buddy studied this in the nascent days of LLMs to prep for an interview and is now generationally wealthy. Sliding doors moment for sure...