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by KurSix 215 days ago
LLMs like Chat GPT don't actually understand text the way a person does. They don't have concepts or any life experience. When you type something, the model turns your text into a bunch of numbers (called a "vector"). Every token (like a word or part of a word) is basically a point with coordinates in a massive, high-dimensional space. The distance between these points shows how related their meanings are

For example, the vectors for "king" and "queen" will end up being really close together, while the vectors for "king" and "table" will be way far apart. Then, the transformer part kicks in with its self-attention mechanism. This is a fancy way of saying it analyzes how all the words in your text relate to each other and figures out how much "attention" to pay to each one. This is how the model gets the context. It's how it knows that the "bank" in "river bank" is totally different from the "bank" in "open a bank account" Based on all those relationships, it then predicts the next token. But it's not just guessing -it's making a highly probable prediction based on all the context it just looked at

To put it simply: the model isn't "aware" of what anything means. It's just incredibly good at modeling how meaning is expressed in language