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Watch it guess

Type something and press the button. The model reads it one letter at a time, and for every single letter it writes, these five steps happen in order.

The model continues from whatever you type.
Low: it always picks its favourite. High: it takes chances and gets weird.
Slow shows you each step as it happens.
the
01

Turn the letters into numbers

Computers only do arithmetic, so every letter gets a number first. In this model a is 3 and bis 4. Nothing clever is happening yet — it’s just a code, like A=1, B=2.

Press “Write me a sentence” to fill this in.

02

Give each letter a scorecard

One number can’t say much about a letter, so each one gets 32of them. Here’s the strange part: nobody chose what those 32 numbers mean. The model made them up while it was learning, and they only have to be useful to it. Blue is a positive number, orange is negative.

which letter it is
where it sits
the two added up
03

Look back at what came before

To guess what’s next, it re-reads everything so far and decides which letters matter most right now. The brighter a letter glows, the more it’s paying attention to that one. It can only look backwards, never forwards — that’s what makes the guess honest.

The same letters as step 01, lit up by how hard it’s looking.

04

Guess what comes next

It gives a score to all 25 letters it knows, then turns those scores into percentages that add up to 100. This is the guess. Here are its top eight.

05

Pick one

It doesn’t always take the top choice. It rolls a weighted dice — a 60% letter gets picked about 60% of the time. That’s why the same starting words give you a different sentence every time you press the button.

Watch it learn

A brand new model knows nothing at all, so its first guesses are pure noise. Every round it guesses, checks how wrong it was, and nudges all 10,937 of its numbers a tiny bit in the direction of being less wrong. Do that a thousand times and gibberish turns into sentences.

Press the button to wipe this model back to random numbers and teach it again from scratch, right here in your browser. It takes about half a minute. The dashed line is how wrong pure random guessing would be — watch the blue line fall below it.

round 0how wrong —random guessing 3.22
Press start and this fills up with whatever the model believes so far. It begins as complete nonsense.

Everything it has ever read — go ahead and search it

These 58 sentences are everything this model has ever read. Not a sample — all of it. Every one follows the same shape: the (word) (animal) (did something) the (thing).

There are 5,120 sentences that fit that shape, and it only ever saw 58of them — about one in ninety. So most of what it writes is brand new. Paste a sentence it just wrote into the box and see whether it’s in here.

  1. the wet bug ran to the mat.
  2. the new dog sits by the van.
  3. the big cat sits by the bus.
  4. the old pig saw the van.
  5. the sad bug saw the rug.
  6. the wet pig sang to the rug.
  7. the new fox sang to the van.
  8. the new hen hid in the rug.
  9. the fat bug hid in the cup.
  10. the sad cat hid in the rug.
  11. the old bug sits by the box.
  12. the sad cat ran to the rug.
  13. the fat dog saw the log.
  14. the sad owl ran to the bus.
  15. the sad owl sits by the hat.
  16. the sad bug sat on the cup.
  17. the old dog hid in the van.
  18. the wet pig sat on the van.
  19. the old hen sang to the van.
  20. the new hen sat on the rug.
  21. the red dog ran to the log.
  22. the red fox fell off the bed.
  23. the red bug sang to the pot.
  24. the new hen sat on the pot.
  25. the red bug hid in the bed.
  26. the new dog ran to the cup.
  27. the new fox sang to the log.
  28. the wet dog saw the box.
  29. the new cow fell off the bed.
  30. the sad dog fell off the van.
  31. the new bug sang to the van.
  32. the red pig saw the cup.
  33. the big fox hid in the bus.
  34. the new bug sat on the bed.
  35. the red bug sat on the cup.
  36. the new cow sat on the bus.
  37. the red owl hid in the van.
  38. the hot hen fell off the pot.
  39. the new fox hid in the bed.
  40. the wet owl fell off the cup.
  41. the sad cat saw the hat.
  42. the hot cat ran to the van.
  43. the sad fox fell off the bed.
  44. the fat owl ran to the mat.
  45. the hot pig ate the bed.
  46. the red dog sat on the rug.
  47. the red fox fell off the hat.
  48. the wet cow sang to the mat.
  49. the wet fox sang to the log.
  50. the sad fox ate the bed.
  51. the red bug sang to the box.
  52. the fat bug fell off the bed.
  53. the old cow ran to the bus.
  54. the sad owl ran to the cup.
  55. the hot fox ate the hat.
  56. the sad owl ran to the rug.
  57. the big dog saw the log.
  58. the red hen ran to the hat.

25 different characters, 58 sentences, and that is the entire education this model has had.