The world has changed considerably since our last"think week"five months ago—and so has Every. We’ve added newbusinessunits,launchednewproducts, and brought on new teammates. So we’re taking this week to come up with new ideas and products that can help us improve how we do our work and, more importantly, your experience as a member of our community. In the meantime, we’re re-upping four pieces byDan Shipperthat cover basic, powerful questions about AI. (Dan hasn’t been publishing at his regular cadence because he’s working on a longer piece. Look out for that in Q2.) First up is hispiecefrom last May that explains how language models work.—Kate LeeWas this newsletter forwarded to you?Sign upto get it in your inbox.If we want to wieldlanguage modelsin our work and still call the results creative, we’ll have to understand how they work—at least at a high level. There are plenty of excellent guides about the internal mechanisms of language models, but they’re all quite technical. (One notable exception isNir Zicherman’s piecein Every about LLMs as food.) That’s a shame because there are only a handful of simple ideas you need to understand in order to get a basic understanding of what’s going on under the hood.I decided to write those ideas out for you—and for me—in as jargon-free a way as possible. The explanation below is deliberately simplified, but it should give you a good intuition for how things work. (If you want to go beyond the simplifications, I suggest putting this article into ChatGPT or Claude.)Ready? Let’s go.Become apaid subscriber to Everyto unlock this piece and learn about:How language models transform words into rich contextual "Super Words"The mathematical mapping of meaning in continuous spaceWhy context creates predictive powerThe art of wielding LLMs as creative toolsUpgrade to paidClick hereto read the full postWant the full text of all articles in RSS?Become a subscriber, orlearn more.
