LLM stands for Large Language Model. An LLM is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) program that can understand and generate human-like language. They're called "large" because they're trained on a massive amount of text data, often from the internet, books, and other sources.
How They Work
At their core, LLMs work by predicting the most probable next word or sequence of words in a sentence. This is done through a process of training and fine-tuning.
- Training: An LLM is trained on a huge dataset of text. During this phase, it learns the patterns, grammar, and statistical relationships between words and phrases. Think of it as the model reading billions of pages of content to absorb how language is structured.
- Architecture: Most modern LLMs are built on a type of neural network called a transformer. This architecture is particularly good at understanding the context of words in a sentence, regardless of their position. For example, it can understand that in the sentence "The cat sat on the mat," the word "mat" is what the cat is sitting on, and not something else.
- Tokenization: The LLM doesn't actually "read" words. It first breaks down the text into smaller units called tokens, which can be words, parts of words, or characters. These tokens are then converted into numerical representations (vectors) that the model can process.
- Prediction: When you give the model a prompt, it uses its training to predict the next token that should follow. It repeats this process, token by token, to generate a complete response. The output is a series of predictions, and it chooses the one with the highest probability.
In essence, an LLM is a sophisticated prediction engine. It doesn't "think" or "understand" in the human sense, but its ability to predict the next word with high accuracy gives it the appearance of human-like intelligence. |
