Does AI Actually Understand Language?

This article was originally published by Quanta Magazine. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but how many numbers is a word worth? The question may sound silly, but it happens to be the foundation that underlies large language models, or LLMs--and through them, many modern applications of artificial intelligence. Every LLM has its own answer. In Meta's open-source Llama 3 model, words are split into tokens represented by 4,096 numbers; for one version of GPT-3, it's 12,288.