When an image model generates a portrait from the phrase “a lighthouse on a cliff in the fog”, it does not draw anything. There are no strokes, no brushes, no edges placed one after anothe...
Every time you type into a chatbot, you have switched on a machine that does not “remember” your conversation the way a person does. It does not re-read it: it recomputes it. And that reco...
Every time you ask something of a chatbot, a semantic search engine or a shop’s recommender, there is no keyword matching going on underneath. Your sentence has been turned into a vector: a list...
Training a large language model does not stall for lack of compute. In a training cluster thousands of graphics cards spend a good part of their time waiting for each other, and the culprit is almost ...
When you talk to a language model, the answer is cooked up in a few seconds inside a machine with very little magic in it: memory, bandwidth and millions of multiplications. What is striking is the ar...
When an app tells you «products similar to this one», «articles you might like» or «similar images», it is not comparing your selection against every other item row by row. There is a step beforehand ...
When you ask a language model to retrieve «the most similar thing» to a question, it does not open a normal database and search word by word. It does something stranger: it turns every text into a lis...
Opening dozens of browser tabs without a thought for RAM, creating lists, dictionaries or objects and then forgetting about them: almost no programmer worries today about freeing memory manually. That...
That an AI assistant manages to “read” a PDF, query a database or run a command is not magic: it is a protocol. It is called the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and, since November 2024, it h...
You switch the computer off and its RAM forgets everything: that is the well-known part. What is told less often is that, even while the machine is running, that memory is “forgetting” non...
A classic search engine compares characters: if you type «open bakery», it only finds pages containing those exact words. Modern engines —the ones powered by language models— do something quite differ...
When you chat with an AI assistant, what happens behind the screen is not a lookup in a database of answers. Behind it is a large language model (LLM): a neural network that does not “know”...