This what it said when I asked it, but don't ask me to explain it:
What does A.I. convert human language into, in order to compare the words with the algorithm?
AI converts human language into high-dimensional numerical vectors, often called vector embeddings. These are essentially long strings of decimal numbers representing coordinates in a multi-dimensional mathematical "meaning space
How Language is Transformed into Math
To process your words, AI follows a strict pipeline:
Tokenization: The algorithm breaks text down into small pieces called tokens (which can be words, prefixes, or characters) and assigns each a unique ID number.
Vector Embeddings: Each token is mapped to a dense list of numbers. A single word can be represented by thousands of dimensions (e.g., 1,536 to 3,072 separate numbers). Each number acts as a coordinate tracking a specific micro-feature of meaning, syntax, or context.
Contextual Math: Words with similar meanings or grammatical rules are mathematically positioned close together in this coordinate system. Because language is reduced to geometry, the AI can perform equations like:
Vector("King") - Vector("Man") + Vector("Woman") approximates to Vector("Queen")
Is it really "just" database matching?
No, it is much more dynamic than a static database lookup. While some AI applications use standard vector databases to fetch similar documents (Retrieval-Augmented Generation or RAG), modern Large Language Models (LLMs) operate on active predictive generation, not simple database matching.
The Transformer Architecture: Models use Self-Attention mechanisms to dynamically alter a word's vector depending on the words around it. For instance, the word "bank" will be assigned a completely different vector in the phrase "river bank" compared to "investment bank".
Probabilistic Computation: The algorithm doesn't copy-paste text from a memory bank. Instead, it processes the text through billions of internal mathematical nodes (weights) to calculate a probability distribution for the next logical token.
Emergent Logic: Stacking these layers of math allows the AI to discover the complex geometric patterns of human logic, enabling it to map out reasoning paths rather than merely retrieving matching records.
The only part of this that seems close to what I was saying earlier is the Probabilistic Computation bit. Clearly AI models have made some progress since I last used finite state machines to unsuccessfully predict next week's Lotto numbers in the previous century.