How Large Language Models Actually Work, Explained Simply

Large language models, or LLMs, power many of the chatbots, writing assistants, and coding tools that have become common in everyday software.

At its core, a language model does something narrow: it predicts what text is likely to come next, given the text it has already seen.

This sounds almost too simple to explain the fluent, on-topic responses these tools generate.

The key technical ingredient is an architecture called the transformer, which uses a mechanism known as attention.

Training typically happens in stages.