Question 08 · What is AI and how does it work?
Does AI just find words and have a conversation?
Short version
Yes, at its core that is exactly what a language model does. It calculates, piece by piece, which word most likely fits next. Whole conversations emerge from this, without the AI understanding what it is talking about, the way a human does.
Long version
A language model breaks text into small building blocks, often parts of words. For each position, it calculates which block is likely to follow and with what probability, picks one, and repeats the process. Because it takes the whole text so far into account, a coherent line of thought emerges. This works so well because human language contains a great deal of knowledge about the world.
AI can also have conversations with other AI. In companies, several agents already work together: one researches, one writes, one checks. They exchange information in ordinary language. That sounds like a conversation, but it is a division of labor following rules that people have set.
For you, this means: a fluent answer is no proof of a correct answer. With AI, eloquence and truth are two different things.
AI has mastered the form of conversation, you still have to check the content.
Sources for this question
- Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762
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