[osanseviero]

Just math, and not even that fancy.

Let's say you want to predict if you'll pass an exam based on how many hours you studied (x1) and how many exercises you did (x2). A neuron will learn a weight for each variable (w1 and w2). If the model learns w1=0.5 and w2=1, the model will provide more importance to the # of exercises.

So if you study for 10 hours and only do 2 exercises, the model will do x1w1 + x2w2=10x0.5 + 2x1 = 7. The neuron then outputs that. This is a bit (but not much) simplified - we also have a bias term and an activation to process the output.

Congrats! We built our first neuron together! Have thousands of these neurons in connected layers, and you suddenly have a deep neural network. Have billions or trillions of them, you have an LLM :)