TKN·00 — THE BEGINNING
AI for beginners
You do not need to be technical. You need to know five things — after that it is practice.
Five steps, in order
Understand what it actually is
A language model knows nothing. It predicts which piece of text comes next, based on an enormous amount of text it has read. Every other behaviour follows from that one fact.
Learn the word token
A token is a piece of text the machine turns into a number. Tokens are the unit of both price and memory. Estonian burns through more of them than English.
Ask properly
Give context, state the role, show an example, and say what form the answer should take. Most bad answers come from bad questions.
Always verify
AI does not know when it is wrong, because it does not know when it is right either. Check numbers, names, dates and citations yourself.
Decide what you paste in
Customer records, ID numbers, contracts and health information do not belong in a free consumer account. Check what the service does with your data.
Once that is clear
The glossary explains each term in one sentence. The tokenizer shows you how the machine sees your own writing.