stage · What AI actually is
05What an LLM is, plainly
No magic. It read the internet and learned to continue text
The most useful thing you can do early on is stop thinking of AI as either magic or a person. It is neither.
Modern AI is a language model, an LLM (large language model). It read an enormous slice of everything people have written and learned exactly one thing: guessing what comes next. You write the beginning, it continues. Everything else is built on top of that.
Boring? But all of its power grows from exactly there. It has read so much code, documentation and discussion that "just continue the text" means writing a working function, finding a bug, or explaining why the server isn't responding.
Its weaknesses grow from the same root. It doesn't "know" in the human sense and doesn't always check itself. Point it towards nonsense and it will cheerfully continue towards nonsense.
Knowing this clears up two misconceptions at once. First: "what if it's judging me" - it isn't, ask anything. Second: "it's smart, so it must be right" - also no, verify.