Member-only story
Why ChatGPT Doesn’t Know How Much Money You Have
And how it actually works
Imagine asking ChatGPT: “How much money do I have in my bank account?”
It won’t answer. It can’t.
Not because it’s playing hard to get, but because it genuinely doesn’t know. And that’s not a bug, it’s the whole point.
Despite what it feels like, ChatGPT isn’t an all-knowing AI that understands the world the way you or I do.
It’s a giant pattern machine. It reads your input, predicts the next most likely words, and spits them out. That’s it. There’s no database of your life. No access to your banking app. No secret camera watching you spend €5.90 on a cappuccino and brioche.
Language vs. Knowledge
When people talk to ChatGPT, they often assume it’s thinking. But that’s a bit like assuming a calculator understands your math problem.
Language models don’t “know” things in the way humans do, they just simulate knowledge based on text patterns. Ask it about the causes of inflation or the philosophy of Plato, and it can give you incredibly good answers. But ask about your personal life, and it draws a blank.
Why? Because it wasn’t trained on your personal data. It was trained on books, websites, Wikipedia…
