Who's Doing This? Why? Who's Paying?
How Does an LLM Work?
The people: Altman, Hassabis, Amodei, Hinton, LeCun, Gebru, DeepSeek. The money. Three competing development models: US VC, Chinese state, European regulatory.
Learning Material
5 pagesLesson 7 — Who's Doing This? Why? Who's Paying?
Understanding the Complex: How Does an LLM Work?
As of May 2026
You now understand how the machine works. Here's the harder question: who built it, why, and with whose money?
This matters because the values embedded in RLHF training, the decisions about which capabilities to develop and which to restrict, the choices about who can access these systems — all of these are made by people with specific interests, histories, and financial incentives. Understanding the machine without understanding its makers is half an education.
Follow the money. That's how adults read the world.