AI School › How it’s built inside · Lesson 70 of 130

⏎ What happens when you press enter

In an instant your sentence takes a journey inside the AI.

You press enter and in a flash an invisible journey begins. First your sentence is chopped into tokens, those little tiles we talked about. Then each token becomes a list of numbers, its coordinates on the word map. These numbers enter the network and cross all the layers, one after another: at each level the neurons turn on or off according to their weights, mixing the information. It is like a letter passing from one post office to the next, sorted and handled at every stop, until it arrives at its destination with a ready reply.

At the last layer the AI does what it does best: it guesses the most likely token that should come next. It writes it, then starts over to guess the following one, and then the next, one little word at a time, like dominoes falling tile after tile. That is why you sometimes see the answer appear bit by bit on the screen: it is building it in front of you. All of this, from tokens to the final reply, happens in less than a second, thanks to billions of calculations done in parallel. A very long journey completed in the blink of an eye, every time you press enter.

🎒 Try it in class (or at home)

Line up five dominoes and topple them: that is how AI generates words, one after another until the end.

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