The AI That Writes One Character at a Time
Contents › Chapter 1 Guessing the next character
It answers in percents
Instead of one answer, it gives every character a percent
View in 3DWider slots get picked more
The AI never gives just one answer. It says things like "30% for this character, 15% for that one..." and gives every character a percent. We drew this as the spinning wheel of a slot machine, called a reel. The bigger the percent, the wider the slot.
Next-character candidates: ‘,’ 38% · ‘.’ 33% · ‘␣’ 26%
Why?It means the same as "30% chance of rain" in a weather forecast. This AI knows 60 characters, and all their percents add up to 100%. The very thin slots are grouped into one gray slot. The box below lists the top five.
Learn moreThere is no real wheel spinning inside the AI. There is only a list of percents. The reel is a picture to help you understand.
View this scene in 3D →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.