How AI Models Work

When people first use an AI system, they often imagine that it reads and understands text the way humans do — word by word, sentence by sentence. In reality, AI models see text very differently. At the center of that difference is something called a token . What is a token? A token is a small piece of text that an AI model works with internally. It might be a whole word, part of a word, a number, or even a punctuation mark. AI models do not read letters or words directly. They process sequences of tokens. For example, a simple sentence might be broken into pieces like this: “Artificial” “ intelligence” “ is” “ useful” The exact breakdown depends on the model, but the idea is the same: text is converted into manageable chunks. Why AI models use tokens Tokens make it possible for AI models to handle language mathematically. Each token is represented as a number, which allows the model to calculate probabilities and relationships between pieces of text. I...

Artificial intelligence is often described as something mysterious or almost magical. In reality, most modern AI systems are built around something called an AI model . Understanding what an AI model is makes everything else about AI much easier to follow. So, what is an AI model? An AI model is a system that has been trained to recognize patterns. It doesn’t think, understand, or reason the way humans do. Instead, it looks at input data and produces an output based on patterns it learned during training. You can think of an AI model as a very advanced prediction engine. Given some information, it predicts what is most likely to come next or which option best fits the situation. How an AI model learns AI models are trained using large amounts of data. During training, the model is shown many examples and is adjusted over time to reduce mistakes. This process doesn’t involve awareness or intention — it’s a mathematical optimization process. For example, if a model is trained...