Chapter 1 of 14 · Words and numbers
The guessing game
Let's play a game.
I say some words, and you guess the next one.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star!
You knew it, because you have heard it before.
A language model is a computer that plays this game.
It is very, very good at guessing the next word.
Your turn
Tap the word that comes next.
Toy calculation Recorded Qwen measurementRhyme 1 of 4
Twinkle, twinkle, little ?
What you learned
A language model guesses the next word.
Finish "Your turn" to earn the Guesser sticker.
Grown-up corner: the precise version
- language model = LLM, a large language model
A language model gives a probability to every token in its vocabulary (151,936 tokens for Qwen3), given all the text so far. Text is written by choosing one token, adding it, and asking again.
The bars under the rhymes are real: Qwen3-8B-Base's recorded next-token probabilities after "The researcher opened the notebook" (bfloat16, one forward pass).