There is one sentence that explains almost everything an AI does, well and badly: <b>it predicts what comes next.</b> Not what is true. Not what you asked. What is most likely to follow the words in front of it.
Give a model the words "The best thing about a rainy day is" and it does not think about rain. It works out which word most often follows those words, picks one, adds it, and then does the whole thing again with the new sentence.
One word at a time, thousands of times a second. That is the entire machine.
Most of the time, continuing a question well is the same as answering it. Most of the time.
Before you ever used it, the model read an enormous quantity of text and adjusted itself so its guesses got better. That is training, and it finished months before you opened the app.
Nothing was stored. You cannot ask it for page 41 of something it read, because there are no pages in there — only the shapes those pages had in common.
It sounds confident when it is guessing, because guessing is all it ever does — a 55% guess and a 99% guess come out in exactly the same voice.
It fills blanks, because a blank is a thing to continue.
It cannot do arithmetic reliably, because it is predicting what a number looks like rather than working it out.
Nobody decided that sentence. It was assembled, one most-likely word at a time, by something that has never smelt rain.
In our free course you build a sentence by clicking the most likely next word, with the real percentages showing. It takes ten seconds and you never forget it.
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