Each reply is predicted from the full conversation so far, the model does not reason, and without memory features it starts completely fresh in every new chat.
5 min
A chat AI is a text-prediction machine
When you send a message, a chat AI does one thing: it predicts the most likely next words based on everything it has been given. At its core, it is not reasoning the way a person does, and it is not looking things up in real time by itself. When an app has web search or other tools turned on, the app runs the search and feeds the results to the model as more text to work from. It is generating text that fits the pattern of the conversation so far.
That prediction ability comes from training. Before you ever touched it, the model was trained on an enormous collection of text, books, websites, code, and more. That training is where all its apparent "knowledge" comes from. Your conversation today is not part of that training; it is just live input for this session.
Select a numbered hotspot to see what occupies that part of the diagram.
Four terms worth knowing. Tap each card to see the definition.
Question 1 of 4
When you send a message, what does the model actually receive?