I always thought of ChatGPT as this magic box that just… understands me. But then I stumbled upon a post that completely changed how I see it. It’s not magic, it’s a terrifyingly effective prediction process, and it’s wild.
This industry pro on LinkedIn broke down the entire process, step-by-step, and it finally clicked for me. It’s not thinking like we do. It’s predicting.
Here’s the 10-step process the author shared:
- 1️⃣ You Type: It all starts with your prompt.
- 2️⃣ Tokenize: ChatGPT chops your words into smaller pieces called “tokens.”
- 3️⃣ Vectorize: It turns those tokens into numbers (vectors) so the machine can process them.
- 4️⃣ Position: It digitally stamps the position of each word in your sentence.
- 5️⃣ Transform: Powerful “transformer” networks analyze all your words at once, not one-by-one.
- 6️⃣ Attention: A cool “attention mechanism” helps it focus on the most important keywords in your prompt.
- 7️⃣ Deep Dive: Your request goes through many layers to figure out the deeper context and meaning.
- 8️⃣ Recall: The model pulls from the massive library of patterns and knowledge from its training data.
- 9️⃣ Predict: This is the key! It predicts the single best word (token) to come next.
- 🔟 Generate: It builds the entire response one word at a time, creating a coherent sentence.
I was blown away when I saw this laid out so clearly. It’s a super-fast prediction machine building answers piece by piece!
The original poster also included a great infographic that visualizes this. You have to check out the full post to see it all!