Session 1 — From a line to a learned line

Where we’re starting: you know basic 2D math (lines, equations) and what a function is. That’s it. Everything else is built here.

Companion to the live teaching session. Read time: ~15 minutes.

What we’re standing on

• A function = a rule that takes an input and gives back an output. Same input → same output, every time.
• A line = y = mx + b. Slope m, intercept b. Give me x, I give you y.

That’s enough to build everything from.

The flip

In math class, you usually see questions like:

“Given y = 2x + 3, what’s y when x = 5?”

You’re told the line — m and b are handed to you. You plug in x = 5, get y = 13. Done.

But that’s not how the world works. In real life, you almost never know the line in advance. You see data — examples of inputs paired with outputs — and you have to figure out the rule yourself.

Concrete example. You collect 5 houses:

sqft   |  price ($K)
-------|------------
1000   |  250
1500   |  350
2000   |  420
2500   |  510
3000   |  600

You strongly suspect: price increases roughly linearly with sqft. So you guess the rule has the shape:

price = m · sqft + b

There IS some m and some b that makes this approximately true. You don’t know what they are yet. Plot the data:

price
 600 |                       •
 500 |                  •
 400 |             •
 300 |        •
 250 |   •
     +-------------------------- sqft
       1000  1500  2000  2500  3000

By eye, you can almost see the line going through those points. Maybe m ≈ 0.18, b ≈ 75. Doesn’t matter — the point is a good line exists, and the job is to find it.

That job — finding the right m and b from data — is learning.

Same equation, two completely different questions

This is the conceptual centerpiece. Same equation y = mx + b. Two opposite ways to use it:

Same equation. Different question.

Everything else in this field — every neural net, every LLM, every image model — is a fancier version of this exact flip. The function gets more complicated. The data gets more complicated. But the question stays the same: given examples, find the rule.

Sidebar: what’s “fixed” vs what “changes” during learning

This trips everyone up the first time. The four symbols in y = mx + b play two very different roles:

Learning = the (x, y) pairs sit still, and we move m and b around until predictions land near the actual y’s.

When someone says “a 7-billion parameter model,” that 7B is the count of m-and-b-like things. The inputs aren’t part of “the model.” The model IS its parameters.

So what’s a neural network?

The simplest possible neural network is y = mx + b. The smallest unit (called a neuron) is literally a line. We only change two things, both cosmetic:

So y = mx + b and y = wx + b are the same equation. ML people just renamed it.

Why “neuron”? Mostly historical baggage — 1950s researchers loosely analogized multiply-and-add to brain cells “weighing” incoming signals. Don’t take the brain metaphor seriously. A neuron is multiply-and-add. That’s it.

When you hear “neural network,” picture a line being fit to points. Everything more elaborate is built by stacking and twisting this base case.

What’s NOT in this picture yet

Deliberately left out — named without teaching:

• More than one input (price depends on sqft AND bedrooms): just price = w₁·sqft + w₂·bedrooms + b. Still a “line” in higher dimensions. → future session.
• More than one output: multiple lines in parallel. → future session.
• The data isn’t actually linear (price grows fast, then plateaus): one line can’t capture this, which is why “non-linearities” exist. → future session.
• How do you actually search for m and b? Gradient descent. → next session.

Self-check

Don’t peek. Answer in your own words:

1. What does it mean to “learn” m and b?
2. If I hand you y = 3x + 1, is that a trained model or untrained? Why?
3. If you had just ONE data point — (sqft=1000, price=250) — could you find m and b? Why or why not?

Question 3 has a punchline: with N parameters, you generally need at least N data points to pin them down. Modern LLMs have hundreds of billions of parameters — and accordingly need oceans of data. That’s the data race.

Where this connects

• Single neuron = linear regression (200 years old; Gauss & Legendre, early 1800s). The “neural network” framing is mostly historical branding on top of “stack many linear regressions with non-linear bumps between them.” See journal.md Entry 1.
• The dense, vectors-and-matrices version of this material lives in archive/session-01-neural-net-basics-dense.md — same ideas, faster pace, assumes more math fluency.
• Next: Session 2 — how the search for m and b actually works (gradient descent, done properly).