What Happens Inside an LLM When You Type “Hello”?

You open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another AI assistant.

You type: Hello

You hit Enter.

A moment later, the AI responds: Hello! How can I help you today?

It looks simple.

But behind those few words, a surprisingly complex process has taken place. Your computer did not simply send the word “Hello” to a database and retrieve a pre-written answer. Instead, the text passed through several stages involving tokenization, embeddings, neural networks, attention, probabilities, and token generation.

At the center of this process is the Transformer architecture, introduced in the 2017 research paper Attention Is All You Need. The paper proposed an architecture based on attention rather than recurrent or convolutional sequence processing, making it much more suitable for parallel computation.

So, what actually happens after you type “Hello”?

Let's follow the journey.

1. It Starts With Your Text

The first thing you provide is ordinary human...

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