Ch 1 · What Is an AI Language Model? · AI & LLM Literacy
Topic 1 of 7 in AI & LLMs — How They Actually Work — 2 lessons.
A Prediction Machine
An AI language model (an LLM — Large Language Model) does one deceptively simple thing: given some text, it predicts what word is likely to come next. Do that over and over, one word at a time, and you get whole sentences, code, and explanations.
Not a Brain, Not a Database
A common myth is that the AI "remembers facts" like a search engine. It doesn't store sentences to fetch later — it stores patterns as billions of numbers (called weights). Here's a tiny taste of next-word prediction using nothing but counting.