What Happens When You Type a Prompt? — Explained in 5 Minutes

The moment you press Enter, your sentence stops being words — it becomes a list of numbers that will cross a continent and pass through a warehouse-sized machine before the first word of the reply appears. This episode follows one prompt from the keystroke to the answer. What's inside: • How text is chopped into tokens and turned into numbers (about 100 tokens per 75 words of English) • What "attention" and layers actually do on a GPU, and why the first word takes a beat to appear • Why the same question gets different answers, and why long chats get slower • What a single answer costs in energy (Google's published figure for a median Gemini text prompt: 0.24 Wh, August 2025) Blackbox opens one piece of the AI machine every week — five-minute animated explainers, no hype, no jargon left unexplained. Next episode: How AI Learned to See Visuals made with AI tools and fact-checked by a human. Voice-over: AI-generated. Blackbox (@OpenBlackBox)