The AI That Writes One Character at a Time
Contents › Chapter 1 Guessing the next character
Guess the next character
This AI does just one thing: guess the next character
View in 3DWhat goes in the blank?
Look at the row at the top. After "Once upon a time" there is a glowing yellow blank tile. What character goes there? You probably thought of a comma, then "there was". This AI does exactly the same thing. It looks at the text so far and guesses the next single character.
Why?It is a bit like the keyboard on your phone suggesting the next word. But this AI guesses one character at a time, not a whole word. Spaces and periods count as characters too.
Learn moreAn AI trained to guess what comes next in text is called a language model. Chatbots are language models too.
View this scene in 3D →Read more
More in the series
A small AI (a character-level language model with 62,652 dials) was really trained on 40 fairy tales and fables retold for this project (about 376,021 characters), and every number here was calculated by that AI. It is a tiny model for learning; real chatbots are far bigger.