Podcast Episode

303 - How LLMs Work - the 20 minute explainer

Fragmented - AI Developer Podcast·Kaushik Gopal, Iury Souza·2 February 2026·26 min

About this episode

Ever get asked "how do LLMs work?" at a party and freeze? We walk through the full pipeline: tokenization, embeddings, inference — so you understand it well enough to explain it. Walk away with a mental model that you can use for your next dinner party. _Full shownotes at fragmentedpodcast.com. Show Notes Words -> Tokens: OpenAI Tokenizer visualizer - Visualize how text becomes tokens Tokens -> Embeddings: RGB Color model - wikipedia Word2Vec technique - wikipedia Efficient Estimation of Word Representation - original Word2Vec paper by Mikolov et al. Embeddings -> Inference: Word embedding Temperature, Top-k, Top-p samping Get in touch We'd love to hear from you. Email is the best way to reach us or you can check our contact page for other ways. We want to hear all the feedback: what's working, what's not, topics you'd like to hear more on. We want to make the show better for you so let us know! Contact us Newsletter Youtube Website Co-hosts: Kaushik Gopal Iury Souza [!fyi] We transitioned from Android development to AI starting with Ep. #300. Listen to that episode for the full story behind our new direction.