Take a breath

That was the hard part of the chapter. Set it down for a moment before the last of it.

One idea underneath all of it. There is no filing cabinet. What the model knows is spread across billions of numbers, none of which holds anything by itself, and every one of which takes part in thousands of unrelated things. It stores things that way because it has more to hold than it has numbers to hold them in.

That is not a fault in the design. It is what learning from examples produces, and it is closer to how your own memory works than to how a computer's works.

What is left is what that costs. Two things a model cannot do, both following from having nothing filed anywhere.