AI Field Map

Interactive study guide

AI Field Map

An interactive wall chart of artificial intelligence: how its fields nest inside each other, how they connect, and what they produce. Select any ringed title or item to see what it builds on and what it leads to.

A note before you start

I'm really interested in AI, and it often confuses me. Every time I sit down to learn it, the field seems to get bigger: more subfields, more jargon, and something new announced almost every week. It's hard to tell where to start, what to learn next, or even roughly how all the pieces fit together.

So I made the map I wanted to have. If you're new and it feels like too much, that's a normal place to be. I'm there too, some days.

How I'd use it, if it helps:

  1. Get the whole picture first. The nested boxes show how the big words fit together: every LLM is a foundation model, every foundation model is deep learning, and so on. The layers below open each box up.
  2. Pick one path, not everything. asks two questions and suggests one. The hours on a path count every book in full, so you can move on long before you finish them.
  3. Tap a word when it stops you. Words with a dotted underline show a short definition. The has the full list. If a whole paragraph is the problem, paste it into

About the speed. New models come out every few weeks, and this map won't keep up with all of them. My reading is that most of what's new is built on a small set of older ideas that change slowly, so each layer is marked Stable, Slow-changing or Fast-moving. has a few ways to follow the rest without chasing every headline.

I'm still learning this too, so the levels and hours here are my best guesses. — Zulfan

outside ML: hand-written rules, logic, search (Deep Blue)
outside deep learning: decision trees, boosted trees, SVMs
outside foundation models: single-task networks such as ResNet, AlphaGo
not language models: CLIP, Stable Diffusion, Whisper
GPT, Claude, Llama, Gemini
Each box is a special case of the box around it. The small text names things that sit in a box but outside the next one in.

Start here

Where should I start?

Two questions, one suggested path. Change your answers any time.

While you read

Where is this?

Stuck on a paragraph full of words you don't know? Paste it here. The map picks out the terms it knows and shows which part of AI they come from.

Results appear here: the areas of AI the text belongs to, and every term the map recognised.