What Actually Happens When You Prompt AI?

What happens in the 300 milliseconds between pressing Send and getting an AI response?

In that fraction of a second, your message travels through 18 layers of technology from the mechanical switch beneath your finger, across fiber optic cables on the ocean floor, through trillion-transistor GPUs, down to quantum-scale electrons responding to electromagnetic fields.

This is the complete journey. Every layer explained.

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CHAPTERS

0:00 — The Prompt
0:08 — Keyboard (USB & Matrix Scanning)
1:12 — Browser (DOM & Rendering)
2:02 — TLS Encryption
3:05 — TCP/IP Stack
4:03 — BGP & Internet Routing
4:55 — Fiber Optics & Submarine Cables
6:01 — Datacenter Infrastructure
6:52 — GPU (NVIDIA H100)
7:58 — Transformers & Attention
9:25 — Python → PyTorch → CUDA
10:34 — Operating System (Linux)
11:34 — CUDA Cores & SIMT
12:27 — Boolean Logic & Gates
13:09 — EUV Lithography
14:05 — The Transistor
15:04 — Silicon & Semiconductors
15:59 — Electrons & Quantum Effects
16:57 — The Response

REFERENCES & FURTHER READING

Keyboards & Input
• Dan Luu - Keyboard Latency: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/
• MDN Web Docs - KeyboardEvent: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/d...

Networking & TLS
• Cloudflare - TLS 1.3 Overview: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tls-1-3-o...
• BGP Table Statistics: https://bgp.potaroo.net/

Submarine Cables
• Submarine Cable Map: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
• Microsoft MAREA Cable: https://news.microsoft.com/marea/
• Google Dunant Cable: https://cloud.google.com/blog/product...

GPU & AI Hardware
• NVIDIA H100 Datasheet: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-cen...
• NVIDIA CUDA Programming Guide: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-p...

Neural Networks
• "Attention Is All You Need" (Vaswani et al., 2017): https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

Semiconductors & Fabrication
• ASML EUV Lithography: https://www.asml.com/en/technology/li...

Standards & Specifications
• RFC 8446 - TLS 1.3: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html...
• RFC 793 - TCP: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html...
• RFC 791 - IP: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html...
• RFC 4271 - BGP-4: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html...