Written By Ibrahim Hudson - Published June 1, 2026
When using AI, people often run into two distinct experiences, information overload or putting in a question and getting an answer back. Leaving the learning experience to an afterthought. In today’s society, since AI is being pushed more and more in classrooms and workplaces, learning to use AI is becoming paramount to one’s success.
However, what separates a user of AI from someone who utilizes AI in their workflows?
How they interact with AI. In order to utilize AI you need to understand how it works on a fundamental level. So, here’s the abridged version.
VECTOR DATABASE
AI uses an extraordinary amount of data! Billions even trillions of tokens or data points being used and analyzed over fractions of a second. The way this data interacts with itself uses a concept called vectoring. As pictured above the difference between a traditional data table you would’ve seen in high school is that every piece of data in a vector space has a geometric “distance” from another piece of data across hundreds or thousands of invisible dimensions.
AI is then able to use these coordinates to perform complex calculations and formulate responses to user queries at incredible speeds. The overall process in practice is similar to searching for something through a search engine.
Here’s an example:
“The boy asked his mother for a few dollars to go to the ___”
In your head most likely you finished that sentence with “store”, though why is that? As a human you used your past experiences, context clues, and intuition to come to that conclusion. Though AI [Artificial Intelligence] is just that artificial. So, as AI was being developed Engineers needed to replicate that ability which is where vectoring is needed. You also have a vector database in your mind even if you haven’t realized it. You know “store” is closer to “house” than “cat” because of their relation via “building”.
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