One Token's Journey: The Full Forward Pass

The whole stack assembled end to end — from input text to next-token probabilities, and where the parameters actually live.

Content last verified 2026-09.

Lessons

1. The Stack, End to End
2. One Token's Journey
3. From Logits to the Next Word
4. Where the Parameters Live

Sources

• Vaswani et al. (2017) — Attention Is All You Need
• Kaplan et al. (2020) — Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models
• Elhage et al. (2021) — A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits