What Does AI Actually Look Like?
NickDouglas · reddit · 2026-07-15
This article aims to explain what AI actually looks like under the hood, moving beyond abstract phrases like "many layers and weights." The author compares matrices and weights in a model to a "giant spreadsheet": weights are the numbers in the cells, and user inputs pass through these matrices layer by layer to generate the final response.
The author notes that working on this piece helped them grasp many fundamental concepts: they previously thought of AI as code, but realized it's better understood as massive matrix operations. They also learned that simply "feeding documents to an AI" inherently participates in the learning process of the training context. Overall, it's an explanatory piece aimed at beginners but packed with solid information density.
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