AI for QA / Quiz

How LLMs Actually Work

Next-token prediction, knowledge cutoffs, and why a confident answer is not the same as a correct one.

Difficulty
Easy
Format
Quiz
Points
100
Estimate
7 min

// MISSION BRIEF

Your Mission

Before you trust an AI assistant with your test cases, know what is actually happening under the hood. This quiz covers the mental model every tester needs: how the text gets generated, what the model does and does not know, and which instincts to carry into every AI-assisted task.

// FIRST CONTACT

Battle teaser

At its core, a large language model produces a response by:

  1. ASearching the live web and stitching the top results together
  2. BExecuting grammar rules hand-written by linguists
  3. CLooking up the closest matching sentence in a database of stored documents
  4. DRepeatedly predicting a probable next token given everything before it, one token at a time
Answers, scoring, hints, and the full battle stay sealed.

// SKILL TAGS

llm-fundamentalshow-llms-workhallucinationai-for-qa