“AI” is a misnomer. What the media and the general public consider “AI” it not “AI” – it is a highly sophisticated word calculator. First, what they are calling AI is made possible by a company called ASML. In fact all of our modern CPU/GPU based devices are made possible by ASML. Bottom line, is that it’s a Dutch company and its machines (and its machines only) manufacture the chips insides every CPU/GPU based device you use. You Smart phone, your laptop, your desktop and probably your TV are only possible because of ASML.
ASML just makes the machine that makes the chips, other companies buy their machines and make chips with them. The biggest company to make chips with their machines is TSMC. That company is located in Taiwan, if anything happens to TSMC all your new tech evaporates. That is why the west protects Taiwan. Anyway, back to AI.
AI as you know it are JUST Large Language Models (LLMs). When boiled down to its core, every LLM is just a matrix math calculator. As I mentioned before, my current favorite LLM is Google’s Gemini because it is running on what they call a TPU. Unlike a GPU, an TPU is specifically tailored to do matrix math efficiently, unlike nVidia’s GPUs – that are general purpose chips. In sum, a TPU (or GPU) cannot read text, therefore, before it can process your query it must be tokenized every word into a static list of numbers. For example, the word “apple” might be represented by a string of 4096 different numbers that plot its position in a massive, multi-dimensional conceptual space.
So, when you type in a prompt to your LLM of choice, your prompt is turned in numbers that are then passed through a gigantic mathematical function. At that point the TPUs job (in the case of Google) Matrix Multiplication. It just takes the matrix of your prompt and multiplies it against the models weight matrices over and over again through hundreds of layers.
The reason this matrix math looks like “reasoning” is due to “Emergence”. When you scale matrix multiplication to trillions of parameters and deed ti the entire internet, the math begins to capture the underlying structure of human logic, grammar and facts. In other words, it is not thinking about your prompt/question. It is routing it through a highly tuned statistical filter that naturally shapes those numbers into a logical response.
That’s why it “looks” intelligent, but it’s just a “dumb” but really advanced word calculator.