5 Surprising Truths About How AI Language Models Actually Work
Summary : Five surprising truths about how AI language models really work — from tokens and sudden, scale-driven abilities to why they sometimes "hallucinate", how you can program them with plain language, and how retrieval systems make them more reliable. Introduction If you've used tools like ChatGPT, you know how effortlessly they can write an email, generate code, or explain a concept. That ease feels close to magic. Under the surface, however, these systems run on patterns, probabilities, and careful engineering. Understanding a few core ideas will help you use them smarter and more safely. View my LLM Concepts video below and then read on. 1. They Don’t See Words, They See Tokens When you type a sentence, you see words and spaces. A large language model (LLM) processes a sequence of tokens. Tokens are the smallest pieces the model works with — sometimes a whole word, sometimes a subword fragment. For example, “unbelievable” might be broken into subword parts...