Have you ever wondered how ChatGPT understands your sentences? The answer is hidden in two mathematical tricks that seem more complicated than they are.

Imagine this: You’re texting your friend about weekend plans. You type “Let’s meet at the park tomorrow” and send it. This is simple for you and your friend, right? But if AI were reading this message, it would be translated to something it can actually work with – numbers. Lots of these numbers format into what we call vectors.

Here we are in the world of embeddings and positional encoding, where words become vectors and positions, essential elements for AI to understand human languages.

Imagine opening up about your anxiety to a chatbot at 2 AM, something you usually don’t do with a human. It “listens”, responds, maybe even offers advice. But how does it know what to say? Who trained it, and what values guide its response? Is it really helping or nudging you towards emotional dependence?

These questions are not theoretical. They are at the heart of alignAI’s Mental Health use case.