'AI is a probability machine,' professor tells webinar attendees

In the FLX AI Hub webinar, computing science professor Dave Gadeau walked attendees through the mechanics of modern language models and why they behave the way they do. "AI is nothing more than a probability machine," he said, using a layered "knock‑knock" demonstration to show how models select next words based on statistical likelihood from training corpora.

Gadeau emphasized that training on vast, diverse sources results in many possible continuations for any prompt; the model ranks these by probability and samples among the top candidates. He warned this probabilistic selection explains surprising outputs and underpins many bias modes, and recommended treating AI as a conversational tool whose outputs require human judgment and verification.