AI School › How it works · Lesson 7 of 130

🔮 The trick: predicting the next word

Chatbots complete sentences like a super-powered autocomplete.

Try finishing this sentence: "The cat is sleeping on the...". You thought "sofa" or "bed", right? Your brain predicted the most likely word. Chatbots do exactly this, billions of times: they read everything written so far and pick the most fitting next word, then the one after, and so on.

It sounds like a simple trick, yet with billions of examples it becomes extremely powerful: this is how AI writes summaries, poems and full answers. Understanding the trick gives you a superpower: you know the AI builds likely sentences, rather than guaranteed truths. A sentence can sound perfect and still be wrong.

🎒 Try it in class (or at home)

Completion game: one starts a sentence, the others propose the most likely next word. Then try unlikely words: the sentence turns absurd, that is why AI picks the likely ones.

← Lesson 6: A short history of AI · Lesson 8: Why it sometimes fails: hallucinations →

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