https://rksh.me/tags/llm/Posts in Llmen-USrksh.meHugo 0.166.0Mon, 28 Sep 2026 07:50:00 +0530https://rksh.me/blog/what-happens-when-you-send-a-prompt-to-an-ai/Mon, 28 Sep 2026 07:50:00 +0530contact@rksh.me (Rakesh Gautam)https://rksh.me/blog/what-happens-when-you-send-a-prompt-to-an-ai/<p>You type a question, press enter, and a second later an answer streams back. The experience feels like asking a person who happens to type very fast.</p> <p>Underneath, it is a loop that guesses the next fragment of text and runs again, a few hundred times, with several stages of arithmetic between your sentence and the reply.</p> <h2 id="your-words-become-tokens">Your Words Become Tokens</h2> <p>The model never sees your sentence as words. Before anything else, a tokenizer chops the text into pieces called tokens and swaps each piece for a number. Those numbers come from a fixed list, the vocabulary, which holds around 200,000 entries.</p>