LLMs and transformers

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard about the latest trend in artificial intelligence: Large Language Models and Generative AI. Models such as LAMBDA, BARD, and GPT-4 have been making waves in the tech industry for their ability to generate human-like text, from news articles to poetry to even entire books. The hype around these models is not just about their impressive capabilities, but also about their potential to revolutionize the way we interact with machines and each other. But is all the buzz really warranted? In this article, we'll take a closer look at what Language Models are, how they work, and whether they live up to the hype.

LLM stands for "Language Model" and it's a type of artificial intelligence that is designed to understand and generate human language. LLMs are trained on massive amounts of text data, from books and articles to social media posts and even chat conversations. The more data an LLM is trained on, the better it becomes at understanding and generating language.

One of the key features of LLMs is their ability to predict the next word in a sentence. Let’s imagine you're trying to teach a robot how to talk like a human. You might start by showing it a bunch of books, articles, and social media posts, and asking it to read them and figure out how humans use language. 

The robot would start by looking at individual words and trying to figure out what they mean. But it would quickly realize that words don't exist in a vacuum - they're always part of a larger context. For example, the word "bank" can mean a place where you deposit money, or the side of a river. The robot would need to figure out which meaning is correct based on the words that come before and after it.

This is where transformers come in. Think of a transformer as a little robot that sits inside the big robot's brain and helps it focus on different parts of the text. It's like a little spotlight that shines on the words that are most important for understanding the context.

As the big robot reads more and more text, the transformer gets better and better at shining the spotlight on the right words. Eventually, the big robot becomes so good at understanding human language that it can start generating its own sentences and having conversations with people!

So putting it into simple words - LLMs are like robots that learn how to talk like humans by reading lots of books and articles. Transformers are like little spotlights that help the robots focus on the most important parts of the text. And once the robots get really good at understanding language, they can start talking and writing just like humans do!