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Word Embeddings By Hand: Shannon's 1948 Trick Powers Your AI Chatbot

Your daily AI chats rely on vector magic. Turns out, it's hand-cranked linear algebra from the guy who invented information theory. No GPUs needed.

Sarah Chen 📅 Apr 01, 2026 ⏱️ 3 min read 👁️ 3 views

⚡ Key Takeaways

Word embeddings compress co-occurrences via PMI and SVD—no neural nets required.
Shannon's 1948 information theory underpins it all; Mikolov just repackaged.
Hand-building demystifies AI hype, empowers tinkering on basic hardware.

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Written by

AI research editor covering LLMs, benchmarks, and the race between frontier labs. Previously at MIT CSAIL.

#PMI matrix #SVD truncation #co-occurrence table #word embeddings

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Originally reported by Towards AI