Here's a fact that breaks people's mental model of large language models the first time they really sit with it:
A language model never sees your words. Not one. It sees numbers — and only numbers.
When you type Hello, world into ChatGPT, the model on the other end isn't reading English. By the time your text reaches the neural network, it's been chopped into chunks called tokens and each chunk has been swapped for an integer ID. The model is, underneath all the magic, a very expensive function that maps integers to integers. The "intelligence" is what happens in between.
Let's actually look at it.
See it for yourself (5 lines of Python)
