Terms of use
Last updated 6 November 2026. These are the terms for using Ascend.
Who we are
Ascend is run by ICarta Ltd, Sun House, 2-4 Little Peter Street, Manchester M15 4PS. Company number: 12167146. You can write to us at hello@howllmsactuallywork.com. It is a companion to How LLMs Actually Work.
What the service is
Ascend builds a learning plan about large language models around your goal and your time, teaches it in short lessons, checks your understanding, and (with full access) gives you feedback, a tutor, review and a capstone. It is for learning. It is not professional advice of any kind, and nothing in it is a qualification or a guarantee of any result. You must be at least 16 to use it.
Your account
You sign in with Google or by an email link. Keep your sign-in secure and tell us if you think someone else has used your account. You can export or delete everything from your account page at any time. We may suspend an account that breaks these terms.
Using the service fairly
- Use it for your own learning. Do not share your account, or copy, resell or republish the lessons or questions.
- Do not try to break, overload or probe it, get round its limits or its checks that you are a person, or use it to harm others.
- Do not put anything unlawful, or anyone else’s private information, into it.
The AI features
Feedback on your answers, the tutor, the prompt workbench, the capstone review and the plan summary are produced by an AI model. It can be wrong, incomplete or out of date, and it can sound sure when it is not. Treat it as a study aid and check anything that matters. Do not put in anything you would not want a service provider to process: no passwords, no health or financial details, and no confidential information about other people or your employer. Our privacy policy explains what is sent and to whom. A review can be disputed or repeated within the limits the service shows you, and the result of a capstone review is decided by fixed rules from the marks given.
Free and paid access
A free account includes the diagnostic, your plan, your first 3 lessons, the LLM Lab, and a small allowance of AI feedback and review. Full access removes those limits and adds the rest of the plan, the tutor, the capstone and the credential page. What each includes is shown on the pricing page and may change; we will not take away something you have paid for during the period you have paid for. The AI features have a fair-use allowance: it renews each month on a subscription and every 30 days on a plan pass, and an AI feature pauses for you once its allowance is used, until it renews.
Subscriptions renew automatically each month or year until you cancel. You can cancel at any time from your account page (through our payment provider’s portal); access continues to the end of the period you have paid for. A plan pass gives full access for 90 days from purchase, is a single payment and does not renew. If a renewal payment fails, we keep your access for 3 further days while it is retried. Payments are taken by Stripe, and we never see or store your card number. Prices are shown in pounds. We are not currently registered for VAT, so no VAT is added to them.
Your right to cancel. If you are a consumer in the UK you normally have 14 days to cancel a purchase of digital content or services. When you ask for access to start straight away, you agree it starts during that period and that you lose the right to cancel once the service has been fully provided; if you cancel in the 14 days before then, we refund what you paid less the value of what you have already used.
Your credential page
If you choose to publish one, it shows the name you choose and the ideas you have finished, and is visible to anyone who has the link. Choose a name you are happy to share. It is a record of lessons you finished, not a qualification. You can change it or take it down at any time and the link then stops working.
What you own
The lessons, questions, tools and design are ours (or our licensors’) and are protected by copyright. We give you a personal, non-transferable licence to use them for your own learning. What you write remains yours. You give us permission to store it and process it, including by the AI provider, only to run the service for you.
If something goes wrong
We work to keep the service available and accurate but cannot promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. Nothing in these terms limits liability we cannot limit by law, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or your statutory rights as a consumer. Beyond that, we are not liable for losses that were not a foreseeable result of our breach, for business losses, or for decisions you make relying on the service, and our total liability to you is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose.
Changes and ending
We may update the service and these terms. If a change matters to you we will tell you in advance, and you may stop using the service. You can close your account at any time. We may end or suspend access if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, and we will tell you why where we can.
Law and disputes
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. The courts of England and Wales decide any dispute, but if you are a consumer living in Scotland or Northern Ireland you can also bring a claim in the courts where you live. If you have a complaint, write to us first at hello@howllmsactuallywork.com and we will try to put it right.