WhatsApp and artificial intelligence
Language model
A language model is an artificial intelligence model trained on vast amounts of text that generates language by predicting the next word; a very large one is called an LLM. It is what lets an assistant understand a message written in someone's own words and draft the reply.
Also known asLLM · large language model · AI model · modelo de lenguaje
What it is exactly
It is trained by reading an enormous amount of text and learning what tends to come after what. That gives it something useful and something delicate at the same time. The useful part: it understands "the blind in 204 has gone" even though nobody taught it that sentence, and replies naturally in the writer's language. The delicate part: it writes with the same confidence whether it is right or not, because it generates what seems likely, not what it has checked, and what it knows stops at what it read during training.
That is why, in an AI assistant, the model does not work alone. It is given the residence's context (the house rules, the timetables, the org chart) so that it answers from that, and it is told what is not its call. When it still states something that is nowhere to be found, that is a hallucination. And if the data it was trained on had biases or errors, those can surface in its answers too.
Worth knowing
What people take for granted: that a bigger model knows more about the residence. No model knows what time the door closes at a particular residence: the residence provides that. What changes from one model to another is how well it understands, follows instructions and writes in each language, and that is worth testing with the house's real messages, not with showcase examples.
Sources
Related terms
- AI assistantAn AI assistant is a program that holds a conversation in natural language and, with a language model behind it, understands what it is told even without keywords. In a residence it handles the messaging channel: it answers what is in the house rules, takes requests and passes the rest to a person.
- HallucinationA hallucination, in artificial intelligence, is an answer a model gives with confidence but that rests on no data at all: a timetable that does not exist, a made-up rule, a service the residence does not offer. It sounds just as convincing as a correct answer.