Lessons

Introduction

How a language model works, from first principles.

1. 1 · The Next-Token FlipbookAn AI model does one thing: it reads text and gives the odds for the next token. Everything it writes, it writes one token at a time.
2. 2 · The Shared DictionaryThe model never sees text. It cuts text into tokens, reads each one as a row of numbers from one big table, and scores its output against the same table.