AI School › How it’s built inside · Lesson 64 of 130

🔢 Words become numbers

AI turns every word into numbers so it can "understand" it.

Deep down, AI is a giant calculator: it can only do sums with numbers, it does not know letters the way you do. So how does it read "dog"? It translates every word into a list of numbers, a bit like the coordinates of a dot on a map. Picture a huge map of words: "dog" and "cat" end up close, because both are house pets; "dog" and "banana" end up very far apart. It does not pick these numbers randomly: it learns them by watching which words often appear together in texts.

The neat part is that with numbers the AI can do math on meaning. On the word map you notice that the trip from "king" to "queen" looks like the trip from "man" to "woman": the math captures a relationship! So the AI can guess that if "puppy" goes with "dog," then "kitten" goes with "cat." It does not truly understand like a child, but by measuring distances between numbers it can behave as if it did. It is like a colorblind person who names colors by reading a label: they do not really "see" them, but with the right numbers they get it right almost every time.

🎒 Try it in class (or at home)

Draw a "word map": place similar words close (apple-pear) and different ones far apart (apple-truck).

← Lesson 63: What tokens are · Lesson 65: Why so much power is needed →

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