How is ML understanding the prompt

[Dan O'Brien]

Thanks for the great explanation on language models. One thing I didn't understand fully was how ML was understanding prompts. For example, an answer was given the prompt "What is the largest volcano in the world" . But how did it understand the prompt? Thanks! 

[Dale Lane]

At the risk of getting overly precise, I think it depends on what you mean by "understand" - I'm not sure it is necessarily helpful to think of it as "understanding" the prompt in the same sense that a human would. As I tried to describe in https://dalelane.co.uk/blog/?p=5538 (and in the "Language Models" worksheet that I wrote at the same time as it), at a fundamental level it is a statistical engine that is predicting the most likely next word, based on the words that have come so far. Is that "understanding"? 

More recently, I like https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/?gift=DTHUvkau4_UdZPUWJAYkl4qONoKj3oZG7QAGPz_VH_w and would recommend that as an accessible read on this subject. 

Kind regards

D