Developing generative AI literacy can be a challenge because humans have difficulty conceptualising large numbers. Such numbers expose the limits of our knowledge and our ability to solve problems at scale becomes strained. When I teach students and colleagues about generative AI, they are genuinely shocked to learn that the applications are built on hundreds of billions of texts. Understanding the scale of generative AI operations is important, I explain, because the algorithms that run them need large quantities of text to create reliable output.
