FROM QUESTION TO ANSWER:

When people say “AI” today, they often mean chat-based systems called large language models (LLMs)—tools that read and write natural language. 

This page focuses on LLMs. How an LLM works, in one line: it predicts the most likely next piece of text—again and again—until a full answer appears. This is pattern-matching, not certainty.

Some products connect the model to tools (e.g., web search) to fetch information. Those tools can improve answers, but the core process is still next-token prediction.

Before we go deeper, a few quick terms:

Limits

• Can be wrong or vague if your prompt is vague
  
  

• May sound confident even when mistaken (*verify important information*)
  
  

• Context window is limited; very long inputs may need trimming or summaries for effectiveness