Spreadsheets are all you need.ai

Learn complex AI topics using familiar tools

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"Probably the best 10 minutes you can invest to understand LLMs"

- Guillaume Decugis (Entrepreneur & VC)

"I have seen nothing which could come close in traceability and accessibility to understand transformers and LLMs"

- Maximilian Hentschel (AI Principal Product Manager)

It started with a

Radical Idea

It started with a radical idea: implement GPT2 in Excel to prove AI concepts can be understood with familiar tools.

Today, I bring that same approach of making complex AI topics easy to understand without dumbing them down.

"Bonkers. Fun. Educational. Love it."

- Matt Wood (AWS VP of AI)

"Should be required coursework."

- Scott Arnold

From the AI Engineer World's Fair

"This is the AI equivalent to getting Doom running on a microwave oven."

- Brian Roemmele

"This is so cool! :D And I'm so happy to hear that my work in implementing neural nets in Excel for @fastdotai helped to inspire this wonderful project."

- Jeremy Howard (Fast.AI)

From the

Blog

Software is Content Now

An underappreciated implication of vibe coding is that software isn’t limited to “apps” anymore. It can be more like content. Put another way, bespoke software has become so cheap, we …

Remember when “View Source” democratized web development? That simple right-click opened the door for millions of builders to learn by doing, sparking the participation flywheel that made the browser the …

Benchmarking MCP Agents by Real-World Cost

A team at Zoom recently published “Live MCP 101,” a benchmark that stress tests MCP agents on challenging queries. It’s one of the few benchmarks designed specifically for MCP environments. …

Building an AI Job Cover Letter Workflow with HTML & JavaScript in SAAYN Notebooks

SAAYN Notebooks let you construct AI workflows using just HTML and JavaScript. This tutorial demonstrates how easy it is to extend these Notebooks with familiar web development tools. We’ll use …

AI Prompts You Can Share and Take Anywhere (with Spreadsheets-Are-All-You-Need)

Many AI workflows die in isolation. You craft the perfect prompt chain, get amazing results, and then… it stays trapped on your computer. Your colleagues can’t use it. Your future …

One file, Infinite possibilities: Introducing Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need Notebooks

Imagine a spreadsheet that generates formulas with AI, is easily extendable with HTML & JavaScript, debuggable right in your browser, and sharable instantly with anyone, no installation required. Welcome to …

The Future of AI & Software from the AI Engineer World’s Fair 2025

Earlier this month, I had the privilege of both speaking and attending the AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco. If you’re wondering what the future holds for AI and software, this …

SessionSorter for the 2025 AI Engineer World’s Fair

NOTE: Session Sorter has moved to it’s own domain! Try it at SessionSorter.com About Session Sorter SessionSorter was vibe coded during the 2025 AI Engineer World’s Fair. After manually using …

If you’re not using AI 20 times a day, you might be doing your job wrong.

A year ago, I half jokingly proposed that “If you’re not using AI 20 times a day, you’re probably doing your job wrong.” In multiple instances over the past month, …

Why AI’s ROI is Hiding In Plain Sight

Spreadsheet from the video You’ve probably encountered the headlines of companies struggling to see financial returns from their AI investments or executives cancelling AI rollouts due to disappointing ROI, and …

LlamaCon 2025 Bingo

Today is LlamaCon, the first official virtual conference for Meta’s open-source Llama models. I don’t have any inside information about what will be announced, so I decided to ask the …

ArrrZero: Why DeepSeek R1 is less important than R1-Zero

The headlines about DeepSeek R1’s cost are missing an even bigger story, the R1-Zero model. This model, and research behind it, are reshaping how we thought AI assistants should be …

FLOPS Demystified: AI and the math behind DeepSeek training costs

This might be my most important AI article yet but it’s also my biggest FLOP. FLOPs are one of the most fundamental metrics in AI. To understand how AI works …

"Absolutely amazing for getting a deeper understanding of large language models."

- ShiSh S. (Microsoft)

"Demonstrates step-by-step how transformers work in generative AI language models using a tool familiar to us all: Excel."

- Lucy Tancredi (SVP, Technology)

The Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need

LLM Architecture Course

Skip the mountains of prep work and learn how AI works in just a few hours the Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need course How LLMs Work: A Technical Crash Course for Busy STEM Professionals.

Here's what past students have said:

""Despite being a student in Harvard’s Master’s in Data Science program, I've struggled to understand the concepts that make LLMs so impressive. This class gave me the answers."
- Tony

"Ishan takes a black box, rips it apart to understandable compartments, and clearly communicates what is going on. Highly recommend."
- Joe

This is the class I wish I had a long time ago. I cover not only how LLMs work but the powerful ideas behind why they work while making it as intuitive and easy to understand as possible.

Details and registration at https://maven.com/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need-ai/ai-for-everyone-master-ai-with-spreadsheets

Hope to see you there!

"A force of nature at helping people understand LLMs...the Gutenberg Press of AI."

- Rafael Martins

"Demonstrates step-by-step how transformers work in generative AI language models using a tool familiar to us all: Excel."

- Lucy Tancredi (SVP, Technology)

Go inside a real

AI Model

See inside a real Large Language Model from your browser or within Microsoft Excel.

Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need implements GPT-2, an early precursor to ChatGPT from OpenAI, using vanilla JavaScript and pure Excel functions.

JavaScript

Try the JavaScript version right from your browser!

Excel

The spreadsheet is available in Excel 365 compatible and legacy Excel compatible versions.

"Finally understood LLM tokenization well enough to ask smart questions about it because of these videos. Great resource!"

- Pranav Deshpande

"Once “too scary” to release, GPT-2 gets squeezed into an Excel spreadsheet"

- Ars Technica