How Language Models Work

Lesson 17

The whole picture

All seventeen ideas, in one loop.

Seventeen lessons, one machine. Follow a single message all the way from your keyboard to the reply on your screen. Every stop is something you have already taken apart.

A dragon folded from antique gold paper, its body coiled in one long curve.
All seventeen ideas, folded from a single sheet and running as one loop. Follow one message the whole way round.

Do thisPress Next step six times. At each stop, the grey links point back to the lesson that explains it.

1Follow one message all the way through

2

Take this with you

Five things to do differently from now on

  1. 1 Check any specific fact that matters. Names, numbers, quotes, sources, court cases. It invents these in exactly the same tone it uses for real ones.
  2. 2 Don’t trust it with arithmetic. Use a calculator, or ask it to work through the problem step by step. It is guessing chunks of digits, not calculating.
  3. 3 Start a fresh chat when one gets long or strange. Paste in a short summary of what matters. The window fills up, and old messages quietly drop out of it.
  4. 4 Show one example and say what you want back. “Like this, as a bulleted list, skip the intro.” This is the single biggest improvement available to you, and it takes ten seconds.
  5. 5 For anything recent or private, give it the source. Paste the document in, or use a tool that searches. Its own knowledge stopped the day training stopped.

This is the part worth screenshotting.

The seventeen ideas, one line each