Completion
A completion is what the model returns — not an "answer" in the human sense, but a continuation of the pattern started by your prompt. The model isn't checking facts, reasoning through a problem, or looking anything up. It's completing a sequence. This framing explains both why AI can produce strikingly helpful responses and why it can confidently generate completely wrong ones.
Videos explaining this concept
E007Notes on AI
What AI Receives When You Send a Prompt
A Prompt is commonly misunderstood as the sole input to an AI model. In reality, it is only the visible "Top Slice" of a larger input stack, best understood as a Prompt Sandwich.
E008Notes on AI
Is AI a Student or an Actor
We often mistake AI outputs for fact-checked answers from a reasoning process. In reality, AI generates completions—continuations of patterns, similar to an Improvisational Actor following the rule...
E009Notes on AI
What AI Is Good At vs Bad At
This episode introduces a practical framework for understanding when to use AI by framing it as a "special employee" with three distinct characteristics.
E010Notes on AI
The 5-Sentence Mental Model of GenAI
This episode provides a checkpoint after the foundational episodes, compressing the key concepts into five memorable sentences that serve as a mental compass for AI.
E011Notes on AI
Tokens
AI models do not read words. They read tokens — the basic unit of text a model processes. A token is close to a word but not the same: one word can be one token, several tokens, or several words ca...
E014Notes on AI
Context Window
The context window is the amount of information a model can see at one time. It's not memory — it's working space. The model can only reason about what is currently visible. At any moment, it recei...