Exponents and logarithms

An exponent says how many times to multiply a number by itself: 2⁵ = 32. Exponential growth multiplies over and over, which is why it eventually outruns everything else. A logarithm runs it backwards: log₂ 32 = 5 asks "which power of 2 gives 32?". Language models use eˣ to turn scores into probabilities (softmax) and logarithms to measure how wrong a prediction was.

Why it matters: Softmax and the loss used to train language models are built from exponents and logarithms.

Builds on: Functions and graphs

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