Demystifying Generative AI: Probabilities, Algorithms, and Systems for Software Professionals is a practical, no-nonsense guide to modern GenAI for people who actually ship software.
Most GenAI content today lives at one of two extremes:
- Hand-wavy “prompt engineering tips” with no real foundations, or
- Math-heavy research material that assumes you’re already deep into ML theory.
This book aims to sit exactly in the middle.
It shows you how to understand Generative AI as probabilities, algorithms, and systems—not magic. You’ll see how ideas from probability, information theory, classical machine learning, and deep learning combine to create transformers, foundation models, and large language model (LLM) systems that you can reason about, debug, and design with confidence.
The book is written for working software professionals: software engineers, data engineers, DevOps/SREs, cloud architects, and tech leads. If you’re comfortable reading and writing code, but feel that AI has become a confusing blur of buzzwords, this book is for you.
Each chapter follows a consistent pattern:
- An intuitive explanation of the core idea
- Practical algorithms and pseudocode (language-agnostic, Knuth-style)
- Realistic system perspectives: latency, cost, reliability, security
- Optional “Math Corner” and “Theory Corner” sections for readers who want deeper probabilistic and computational detail
You can safely skip the math and still get full value from the main narrative—but if you’re curious, the deeper sections are there when you’re ready.
What’s inside
The book is organised into several parts:
- Foundations: probability, random variables, Bayes’ rule, information and entropy, latent structure, and embeddings
- From ML to Transformers: classical ML refresher, neural networks, n-grams, RNNs/LSTMs, attention, and the transformer architecture
- Foundation Models & LLMs: what a “foundation model” really is, tokenization and embeddings, training objectives, sampling, multimodal models, and tuning methods like fine-tuning and LoRA
- Systems & MLOps: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool-calling and agents, production-grade GenAI systems, latency/cost trade-offs, observability, and GenAI MLOps
- Reliability & Safety: hallucinations, calibration, uncertainty, alignment, robustness, prompt injection, and guardrail patterns
- Future Directions: metacognitive architectures (“systems that know when they don’t know”), neuro-symbolic hybrids, probabilistic design patterns, and a roadmap for your own learning and projects
By the end of the book, you won’t just “know some GenAI terms.” You’ll have a mental model for how these systems behave, where they fail, and how to design real applications using foundation models, RAG, and agents—grounded in probabilities, algorithms, and systems thinking, not hype.
