How LLMs Understand Text — From Tokens to Meaning (Beginner-Friendly)
How LLMs Understand Text — From Tokens to Meaning (Beginner-Friendly) 🤖 The Computer's Language Problem Computers don’t understand language like we do. If you say: “The cat sat on the mat.” You immediately picture a cat sitting on a mat. But a computer? It sees this as just a series of symbols. It doesn't “understand” anything — unless we first convert that sentence into numbers it can work with. ➡️ Text needs to be converted into numbers (tokens) for LLMs to understand. 🧩 Step 1: Tokenization – Breaking Text into Pieces Tokenization means splitting a sentence into smaller parts (called tokens) and converting each into a unique number (token ID). Example: Sentence : “The cat sat on the mat” Tokens : ["The", "cat", "sat", "on", "the", "mat"] Token IDs : [201, 503, 621, 104, 201, 891] ⚠️ Why Not Just Use Letters? Why not break it down into characters like "T", "...