The AI engine is the raw computation. Not the brains of your workflow.
Tools like ChatGPT and Claude run on an AI engine: a large language model. Your skills, your data, and your agent are what make it useful.
In short
An AI engine is the large language model, like Claude, GPT, or Gemini, that generates text. On its own it only predicts words; your skills, your data, and an agent are what turn it into useful work.
How does AI work? Start with the engine
When people ask how AI works, they usually mean tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Each of those runs on an AI engine: a large language model (LLM). The engine is the part that actually generates the words.
An LLM takes text in and predicts text out. Under the hood it is a neural network trained on enormous amounts of text (books, code, websites, conversations) that learned to predict what comes next in a sequence.
When you send a message to ChatGPT, the model does not look anything up in a database. It generates a response token by token, drawing on patterns learned during training. The output is probabilistic, not deterministic: the same prompt can produce slightly different answers each time.
The main AI engines today
All major LLMs can follow instructions, generate text, write code, and reason through problems. They differ in latency, context window size, cost, and the specific tasks they excel at.
- Claude (Anthropic)Strong at long-context reasoning, careful instruction-following, and nuanced writing, with strong safety properties. Large context windows.
- GPT (OpenAI)Reliable for structured generation and multimodal tasks (text plus images). Wide ecosystem of tools and plugins.
- Gemini (Google)Fast, multimodal, with deep integration into Google services (Docs, Drive, Search).
- MistralLightweight and open-weight, so it can be self-hosted. Good for cost-sensitive or privacy-first setups.
What AI engines cannot do on their own
This is the part that answers "how does AI really work" honestly. LLMs are stateless: they have no memory between sessions unless you provide it. They are frozen at their training cutoff: they do not know what happened after that date unless you tell them. They cannot take actions in the real world unless you give them tools.
So the engine alone is not enough. A powerful LLM with no context and no tools is like a brilliant consultant you brief from zero every single meeting. The useful part starts when you add your skills (instructions), your data (context), and your integrations (tools).
Why your skills should be engine-agnostic
The LLM market moves fast. One model is state of the art, then another passes it a few months later. By the time you read this, the landscape has probably shifted again.
If your workflows are tied to one model, you are locked in to that provider's roadmap, pricing, and availability. AskMojo skills use the SKILL.md format: plain Markdown instructions that run on any engine. Switch from Claude to GPT to Gemini, and your skills stay intact. That is how you keep the useful part, your know-how, even as the engine underneath keeps changing.
Frequently asked questions
- How does AI like ChatGPT actually work?
- ChatGPT runs on a large language model that predicts text one token at a time. It does not look answers up in a database; it generates a response based on patterns it learned during training on huge amounts of text. That is why it can write fluently and also, occasionally, be confidently wrong.
- How does generative AI work?
- Generative AI produces new content, text, code, or images, by predicting what should come next based on training data. For text, a large language model generates the answer token by token. It is pattern completion at enormous scale, not a lookup or a reasoning engine in the human sense.
- What is a context window?
- The context window is the maximum amount of text an LLM can process in one request, including your instructions, your documents, and the conversation history. A 200K-token window holds roughly 150,000 words, or about 500 pages.
- Is Claude better than ChatGPT?
- It depends on the task. Claude generally excels at long-document reasoning and careful instruction-following; GPT has a larger tool ecosystem. Neither is universally better, so the right choice depends on your specific workflow, which is exactly why keeping your skills engine-agnostic matters.
- Can I use my own AI engine with AskMojo?
- AskMojo currently runs on hosted cloud models like Claude. Self-hosted engine support is on the roadmap. Because your skills are plain SKILL.md files, they are compatible with any LLM runtime.
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