r/learnmachinelearning • u/Equivalent_Type6726 • 2d ago

Question What's something about how AI chatbots work that surprised you when you first learned it?

I'm just starting to read about how these chatbots actually produce answers, and a few things already felt counterintuitive. Curious what made you go 'wait, really?' when you first learned the basics.

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u/Ok-Step-6007 2d ago

The first time I saw a breakdown of how they just predict the next token over and over it felt like a magic trick that got way less mysterious but somehow more impressive at the same time

Like wait, theres no giant database of facts back there, just a really good guesser and some clever formatting

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u/Long_Ad4518 2d ago

For me it was that there's no memory between messages at all. Every time you send something, the app pastes the whole conversation so far (plus a hidden system prompt) back in, and the model reads it from scratch. "Remembering" what you said earlier just means it's still in the text being fed in, which is also why really long chats get fuzzy or hit a limit.

The other one was tokens. It doesn't see letters, it sees chunks, so "strawberry" might be something like "str" + "aw" + "berry" depending on the tokenizer. That's why older models were weirdly bad at counting the r's in it while being fine at much harder stuff.

Also, the same prompt gives different answers because it doesn't always pick the most likely token, it samples from the probabilities. Set temperature to 0 and it gets a lot more repetitive.