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AI

Is AI Thinking or Memorizing?
A Look Under the Hood of AI
March 31st, 2025
Written by Brady Doyle
Reasoning vs Reciting
Rachel Gordon/MIT CSAIL
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    Is AI thinking or simply memorizing? This is a question that is at the forefront of many minds when first learning about the world of AI. It is likely our first thought as we are trying to belittle the power of AI to give us intellectual security. But does it have some root in truth? Despite the question's motivation, it is reasonable when considering how AI learns. AI's is trained using two methods of traing; pre-training and post-training. Pre-training is when the model is exposed to a vast amount of general data and gains a general knowledge. This can be in the form of supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and self-supervised learning. Supervised learning is when you train a model on labelled data.