AI Fundamentals. Part 1. AI Fundamentals That Actually Matter
You've been using AI. You haven't been using it right.
Most people prompt. Few people architect. The difference shows up the moment your system hits real data, real scale, or a real bill at the end of the month.
This is the session that changes how you think about building with AI — not the theory you'll forget, the mechanics you'll use every time you open a model.
Most AI courses skip the fundamentals that determine whether your system works in production or falls apart the moment it scales.
In this session, Pavel Spesivtsev CTO @ GapTrap.ai breaks down the core mechanics every practitioner needs to understand before building anything serious.
*What's covered in this video:*
*00:00 — Token Economics*
Why model choice is a cost architecture decision. Real pricing comparison: Claude Haiku vs Opus (Feb 2026). How careless token consumption can cost you $75 in a single request — and how to avoid it.
*08:00 — Context Windows*
What a context window actually is, why 200,000 tokens fills up faster than you think, and why the training data behind most models was never optimized for large context inputs.
*14:00 — The "Cold Zone" Problem*
LLMs pay more attention to the beginning and end of your prompt. Everything in the middle gets less attention. This is architecture, not a bug — and it changes how you should structure your prompts.
*18:00 — RAG Explained Simply*
What Retrieval Augmented Generation actually does: converting your knowledge base into embeddings, pulling only relevant chunks into context, and why getting the extraction layer right is where most RAG systems fail.
*24:00 — Temperature*
The parameter most people ignore. Temperature 0 vs 1.0 — when you want consistency, when you want creativity, and why going above 1.0 typically produces garbage.
*When to stop paying API bills*
Pavel's practical threshold: if you're spending over $2K/month on tokens, it's time to look at your own GPU infrastructure or open-weight alternatives.
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This is Day 1, Module 1 of the AI Operator Workshop — a 5-day in-person intensive in San Francisco covering secure AI deployment, n8n automation, voice agents, penetration testing, and real-time digital employees.
🔗 Next cohort: https://luma.com/aistartacademy
📍 SF Mission District | [email protected]