How models work

Embedding

A list of numbers that represents the meaning of a piece of text, an image or other data, so that similar things end up with similar numbers. Embeddings let software find related content by meaning rather than exact words, which underpins semantic search and RAG.


Where this is taught

15How large language models work
Tokens, embeddings, attention, context windows, temperature and training: what is actually happening when a model answers you.

Related terms

Attention

The mechanism in a transformer that lets the model weigh how relevant each token is to every other token when working …

Backpropagation

The technique that calculates how much each weight in a neural network contributed to an error, working backwards from…

Base model

A model straight out of pretraining, before it has been tuned to follow instructions or hold a conversation. Given a q…

Chain of thought

Step-by-step reasoning written out before a final answer, either prompted ('think it through step by step') or built i…

Compute

Shorthand for the processing power used to train and run AI models, usually on large clusters of specialised chips in …

Constitutional AI

A training approach, published by Anthropic in 2022, in which a model critiques and revises its own responses against …

Beyond the definition

Knowing the word is the easy part

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