How LLMs Figures Out What You Mean - No Math Degree Required

When you type a sentence into an AI, how does it figure out what you mean? In "Do lions roar?", how does it know that "roar" goes with "lions" and not with "Do"? This post walks that whole path with no heavy math. We'll follow "Do lions roar?" from raw text all the way to the model deciding how each word relates to every other word in that three-letter sentence. Along the way we'll turn words into numbers, picture those numbers as arrows, measure how "close" two arrows are, and finally use that closeness to figure out how words relate to each other. By the end you'll have a clear mental picture of how an LLM reads a sentence and works out how the words relate. Part 1: Words become numbersA model can't do anything with letters as underneath the hood, it's all math, so before it can reason about a sentence, every word has to become a number, and then something richer than a number. This happens in two steps. Take a sentence: "Do lions roar?". Each word is a token (we are ignoring the…