Introduction to Language Models (LLMs)

Introduction to Language Models (LLMs)

What is a language model?

A language model (often called an LLM, for large language model) is an artificial intelligence model designed to understand and generate human language. These models are trained on vast text corpora and can:

• Predict the logical continuation of a text
• Generate coherent content
• Answer questions
• Translate between languages
• Summarize text
• And much more...

Types of language models

1. Transformer-based models

Transformers are the dominant architecture behind modern LLMs. They use an attention mechanism to understand the relationships between words in a text.

Examples:

• GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer)
• BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers)
• T5 (Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer)
• LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI)

2. Models of different sizes

LLMs can be classified by size:

• Small models: < 1 billion parameters

  • Example: GPT-2 Small (124M parameters)

• Medium models: 1-10 billion parameters

  • Example: GPT-3 Small (125M parameters)

• Large models: 10-100 billion parameters

  • Example: GPT-3 (175B parameters)