A firmware engineer set out to understand Artificial Intelligence. He ended up understanding his children instead.
When a Google engineer claimed an AI had become sentient, Carlo Valenti was lying under a tanker truck fixing a stubborn device. The news wouldn't let him go. So he did what any reasonable person would do: he spent eighteen months building a transformer AI engine (TRiP) from scratch, in C, during lunch breaks and sleepless nights.
This is not a textbook. It's the story of that trip - told through polenta-fuelled toddlers, bedtime stories, chocolate negotiations worthy of a law degree, and one legendary family drive to the mountains nearly derailed by a two-year-old's digestive system.
Along the way, Carlo discovers that the questions we ask about machines - Are they conscious? Are they free? Do they deserve respect? - are really questions about us. A firmware engineer with a degree in theology is an unlikely guide - which is exactly why the trip goes where no textbook would.
With a father's eye and an engineer's rigor, he turns AI's biggest mysteries into something you can laugh at, and then actually understand.
Includes a gentle, genuinely funny technical appendix - The Tookie Monster - that explains how modern AI really works, no math degree required.
For parents, philosophers, engineers, and anyone who's ever wondered what we're really building.
