How Large Language Models Work
Four steps from the outside in: what a large language model is, how it works at a high level, how your sentence becomes tokens, and how those tokens turn back into an answer. Tokens come before generation because the answer makes no sense until you can see the pieces.
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What Are Large Language Models?
An LLM is not a search engine and not a database. Find out what it really is — a machine that learned the patterns of language from an enormous amount of text, and writes new text from them.
How Does a Large Language Model Work?
Inside an LLM there are no rules and no stored facts — only billions of tuned numbers and one clever trick: every word looks at the words around it to settle what it means.
How Does an LLM Turn Your Words Into Tokens?
An AI never sees your letters. Follow your sentence as it is chopped into tokens, turned into numbers, predicted over, and stitched back into text — and see why tokens explain AI's oddest failures.
How Do LLMs Generate a Response?
An AI does not write an answer — it grows one, adding a single chunk of text at a time and re-reading everything before each choice. That one fact explains streaming, randomness, rambling, and mistakes it cannot take back.