Beyond Words: The Secret Math Behind How LLMs “Read”

Ever wondered how an LLM like ChatGPT transforms a simple sentence into a sophisticated response? It doesn’t see “words” - it sees a multidimensional universe of numbers. If you want to build an AI from scratch, you first have to master the Input Pipeline. Here is the step-by-step journey of a word from raw text to a high-powered vector. Step 1: The Shredder (Smart Tokenization) Machines can’t process a paragraph all at once. We must break text into “tokens.” While simple tokens are just words, modern LLMs use Byte Pair Encoding.