Discover how AI converts words into mathematical representations that capture meaning
Part of Understanding ChatGPT & Modern AI
Educational content slides
Computers don't understand language. They only understand numbers.
So how does ChatGPT "read" your prompt? It converts every word into a list of numbers called an embedding. These numbers capture the word's meaning mathematically.
"Cat" might become [0.2, 0.8, 0.1, 0.6...] and "Dog" becomes [0.3, 0.7, 0.2, 0.5...]. Notice they're similar because cats and dogs are related concepts.
Test your understanding with this quiz.
ChatGPT understands that 'doctor' and 'physician' mean roughly the same thing, even though they're different words. How?
Complete this exercise and get AI-powered feedback.
Now that you understand how embeddings work, where could better similarity matching help?
Think about: Recommendations, search, matching, discovery—anywhere finding "similar things" matters.