This truly wonderful article from the New York Times – nearly a year old – shows how AI chatbots ‘learn’ to reproduce human language:

While the inner workings of these algorithms are notoriously opaque, the basic idea behind them is surprisingly simple. They are trained by going through mountains of internet text, repeatedly guessing the next few letters and then grading themselves against the real thing.

To show you what this process looks like, we trained six tiny language models starting from scratch. We’ve picked one trained on the complete works of Jane Austen, but you can choose a different path by selecting an option below. (And you can change your mind later.)

Well worth the visit – here.