Video narration
When ChatGPT answers you, is it searching for a finished answer-or predicting text like your phone autocomplete? Neither, exactly. Your message and conversation are broken into small pieces called tokens, which aren't always whole words. The model uses patterns learned during training and the context you gave it to estimate what comes next. Here's the key turn: it isn't retrieving a complete response. It makes a next-token prediction-the most likely next piece of text. Then it uses that new piece, along with everything so far, to predict the next one. Repeating this process builds the reply, token by token. It can sound fluent without being certain or understanding like a person. A likely continuation can still be wrong. So, is ChatGPT searching for a finished answer? No. It generates one token at a time by predicting what text is most likely to come next.