One of the most interesting things about artificial intelligence is that, despite all the hype, the best ideas are often the oldest. Language AI is a perfect example. The latest models, with their billions of parameters and dizzying capabilities, trace their roots back to something incredibly simple: counting words.
The First Step, Just Count Words
The earliest attempts at making computers understand language were brutally straightforward. The "bag-of-words" approach, for instance, ignored everything except whether a word was present. If a sentence contained the word "cat," it got a checkmark. If not, it didn’t. No understanding of meaning, no