LLM (Large Language Model)

What is an LLM?

A Large Language Model (LLM) is an AI system trained on enormous volumes of text -- books, websites, articles, and more -- so that it can understand and generate human-like language. Think of it as a super-charged autocomplete: just as your phone predicts the next word you might type, an LLM predicts the next word in a sentence, but with far greater depth and context.

Imagine a student who has read every book in the world's largest library. They haven't memorized every page word-for-word, but they have developed an incredibly rich sense of how language works, what facts tend to appear together, and how ideas connect. That is essentially what an LLM does with data.

How Does It Work?

LLMs are built on neural network architectures -- most commonly the Transformer. During training, the model processes billions of text tokens and adjusts millions (or even trillions) of internal parameters to minimize prediction errors. After training, the model can generate coherent text, answer questions, summarize documents, translate languages, and much more.

Key Examples

• GPT-4 / GPT-4o (OpenAI) -- powers ChatGPT and many third-party apps.
• Claude (Anthropic) -- designed with a focus on safety and helpfulness.
• Gemini (Google DeepMind) -- Google's multimodal large language model.
• LLaMA (Meta) -- an open-weight model family popular in the research community.