AI is a w•o•r•d calculator

Tokens is what it calculates

Last post: AI isn't thinking, just calculating. This post: what it's actually calculating.

The easy formula:

User types request
↓
AI breaks it into small word chunks 🧩(tokens)
↓
system calculates probability of next most likely chunk
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repeats until complete response
↓
user receives statistically probable text sequence (ai reply)

Think of tokens like 🧩 puzzle pieces that words get broken into.

When you type "Hello world!" the AI chops it into smaller chunks: "Hello" becomes one token, " world" (with the space) becomes another, and "!" becomes its own token.

For the AI, each token is just a number.

"Hello" might be #1247, " world" is #8834, "!" is #23. The AI does math with these numbers, calculating which number is most likely to come next.

Common words like "the" are one token. Longer words get split: "Unbelievable" becomes "Un-believ-able" as three tokens.

Therefore:

AI is not seeing "strawberry" as individual letters, but as tokens like "straw" and "berry."

=Mr. A =Attention Maps