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Hacker News·3 min read·medium

TokenTown: A visual way to understand how LLMs work

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✦AI Summary

TokenTown is an interactive, browser-based visualization that represents the internal mechanics of a transformer language model as an isometric city. It simplifies complex processes like tokenization, attention heads, and feed-forward layers to help users understand how LLMs generate text.

Why it matters

It provides a rare, intuitive educational tool for demystifying the 'black box' of artificial intelligence architecture for non-experts.

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A language model laid out as a city, one token at a time

The city is idle. Type a prompt below and watch a single token make the round trip.

12 numbers standing in for the 4,096+ a real model carries. Blue is negative, warm is positive.

TokenTown is an isometric city where every district is one stage of a transformer language model. A convoy carries a hidden state along the roads: it is cut into tokens at the docks, cast into a vector at the foundry, stamped with its position, then driven around the layer ring (attention, residual, feed-forward, residual) once per layer, before the stadium turns it into a probability distribution and the sampler picks one token. That token drives back up the feedback highway and the whole city runs again.

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