How ChatGPT and other AI chatbots answer your question
AI chatbots: why the answer is written for you, not looked up
You ask a chatbot like ChatGPT a question. A sure answer appears on your screen in seconds. A search engine finds pages, but the chatbot did not find this answer on any page. So where did the words come from?
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Your plant is losing its leaves, so you ask a chatbot such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, and press Send.
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Your friend Miva types the same question into a search engine like Google. It hands her links to pages that people wrote before she asked.
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Your chatbot, the app you type in, works another way: it writes none of the answer. It sends your question away, over the internet.
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Your question lands in a data centre, a building full of computers, maybe in another country. A program there reads it: a large language model, or LLM.
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The model then writes an answer for you, one word after another. It copies no page: it makes the sentence as it goes.
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The words travel back the same way, and the chatbot shows them on your screen.
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But look at what reached the model: your question, under a lot more text that you never typed.
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Quick check
A new request, the same trip.
Show the answer
Nowhere yet. A model in a data centre wrote it for you, word after word, and the chatbot brought it back to your screen.
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Go further
What the letters LLM stand for, and chatbots that search the web.