Mechanism
How these things actually work
Almost every surprise these tools produce follows from the mechanism. Ten minutes here prevents a year of confusion about hallucination, forgetting, and why the same question gives two answers.
What a Language Model Is Doing
Not a database, not a search engine, not a reasoning machine in the way people assume. The mechanism explains almost every surprise these tools produce.
Explainer
Fabrication is not a bug being fixed. It is the same process that produces correct answers, operating where the training data was thin.
Explainer
The model has no memory between messages. What looks like conversation is the entire history being re-read every time, which explains several odd behaviours.
Explainer
Tokens, Cost and Length Limits
Models process fragments rather than words or characters. This explains pricing, length limits, and why some languages cost several times more than others.
Reference
Training Cutoffs and Stale Answers
Every model has a date after which it knows nothing, and it will answer questions about that period anyway, confidently and wrongly.
Explainer
Reasoning Modes: Cost and Benefit
Models that work through steps before answering are genuinely better at some problems and no better at others. Knowing which is which saves time and money.
Analysis
An agent is a model given tools and permission to act in a loop. That is genuinely useful and it introduces failure modes a chat interface does not have.
Analysis
The distinction is about who controls the model file, and it determines your privacy position, your costs and your exposure to a vendor's decisions.
Analysis
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