How does AI talk?
AI is a machine that picks the next piece over and over, really fast.
1 · Think first
AI doesn't write a whole sentence in one go. All it does is pick just the next piece.
It adds the piece it picked, then picks the next one — repeat that hundreds of times and you get the long answer you see.
So AI isn't fetching an answer from somewhere. Every time, it freshly picks the most likely next piece.
2 · Experiment · Probability slider
Try it — the next-word picking machine
Let's play AI. You'll see the candidate words for the blank and the chance of each one. Press the button and one of them gets drawn and added to the sentence.
The percentages are made-up example numbers to explain the idea. A real AI does the same math, but with far more candidates.
Figure
In one picture
This is everything AI does in one step. The rest is just this, repeated.
3 · Quiz
Quick check
Three questions. Pick an answer and it's marked right away, with the reason why.
Today in one line
Today in one line
AI is a machine that picks the next piece
over and over, really fast.
Learn more
- This approach first really took off with the 2017 Transformer paper — Attention Is All You Need
- In 2020, GPT-3 wrote long, human-like text with nothing but this method, and the world was amazed — Language Models are Few-Shot Learners