What is an LLM? Simple Guide for Beginners

What is an LLM (Large Language Model)? Simple Guide for Beginners

In our previous blog, you learned what AI is and how it works. Welcome to Day 2 of this AI course for beginners.

One important thing first — if you haven't read the previous blog yet, please go back and check it out first, so today's post makes even more sense to you.

Different Types of AI Models

AI has a lot of different models. Like you must've heard — someone writes text and gets a video out of it, or writes text and gets a photo out of it. These are all diffusion models. And if you've used ChatGPT or Google Gemini, those are all language models. There are a lot of different models out there, but we won't go too deep into all of them, because that'll just create a lot of confusion for you. So among all these models, the most popular one is the Large Language Model, i.e., LLM.

You must've heard about LLMs a lot on social media and YouTube too, but you probably don't know what it actually is. There's a type of AI that gets talked about a lot, and you've definitely heard about it too — LLM, Large Language Models. It's a pretty important type. A pretty popular type of AI. So let's understand LLMs in a simple way right now. What are they? How do they work? What exactly is this thing?

So first, let me make this easy for you — if you've heard the name ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Claude, then bro, these are all LLMs. It's not some huge mountain that feels difficult to you. Even if you've just heard the name ChatGPT — that's an LLM too. Now what exactly is this? Let's see.

What Exactly Are LLMs?

So basically, these LLMs are Large Language Models. And these models use deep learning, and they're trained on millions and trillions of words. Meaning, they're trained on a huge amount of information.

Let's leave "large" aside for now and focus on "language model." Like, when we use social media — what's inside it? Language. Students study, do their homework — what's inside that? Language. Someone in a business is writing their emails, someone's writing job letters, contracts are being signed, tutorials are coming out — so what's common in all of this? Language. So this means, if we have an AI that understands language really well, that AI can make a lot of our human tasks easier, because it's understanding language, and most of our work depends on language anyway.

The Librarian Example

You've all been to schools and colleges. So suppose you went to a school, and there's a huge library there, with books on different subjects, and there's a librarian sitting there. A librarian who knows about all the books kept there. Meaning, that librarian has memorized everything. Everything is in her mind. She knows what's written in which book. She's taken in all the information. And now, whatever you ask her, she'll give you the answer instantly. Meaning, she's not giving you any new knowledge — based on whatever information she has, whatever patterns she's observed within herself, she'll give you the answer accordingly. So this is a basic explanation of how a language model works.

But now suppose that same librarian gets a lot of powers. She becomes so big that — right now she only has the information of one school's library. Now suppose she gets the information of other schools in this city too. Apart from schools, she gets to know about universities, about people's homes. Then after that, she gets to know the information of different cities in India. She gets to know about movies, politics, different states. And after states, if she gets the information of the whole world, then how powerful will she become? And now that same librarian has trained so much that now you can't just ask her library questions — you can ask her a lot of other things too. Like you asked something about history, you asked her about movies, about politics, you took some nutrition advice — and she'll be able to answer all of that, because now she's trained on a huge volume of data.

So this is what a Large Language Model is — one that has all the information, and when we ask questions from such Large Language Models, they give us answers based on that same information.

Definition of LLM

A Large Language Model, i.e., LLM, is an AI system that learns from a lot of written text — meaning it understands from that text — and uses that learning to understand what we say and reply in a human-like way. Meaning, a model that's an expert at understanding text. It understands text really well. And then it's also an expert at giving answers in the same style the question was asked in.

Where Can LLMs Help You?

And now you're thinking — where can these LLMs actually help you?

So if you're a student and some topic feels difficult, they'll help you with that. If you make videos, they can help you write scripts. They can help you in coding, in learning a new language. If you want to learn cooking, you can take tips from here. In writing better emails, making presentations, even in making job resumes — they can help you here too. Meaning, there are a lot of use cases. Whatever work you have, try asking ChatGPT, Google Gemini — and they'll help you. But don't get confused — we'll tell you further how to use these tools.

What is a Prompt?

And one more important thing before that — whatever we ask AI, whatever question we type to it, that's called a prompt. And the output depends on this prompt — how the AI's answer is going to be. Meaning, a good prompt will give a good output, and a bad prompt will give a bad output. And how to write prompts, how to write good prompts — we'll tell you that too, going forward.

How LLMs Actually Work

So this is what I wanted to explain to you about LLMs, and I hope it's clear to you now. And one more thing — these models work on Transformer architecture, because of which they understand the context and relationship between words. Meaning, they work by understanding the meaning of sentences and the connection between words. And that's why they're able to have smooth and natural conversations.

LLMs Are Not Perfect

And remember — these LLMs can't think like us humans. It's just that these LLMs have become so perfect at predicting the next word that it feels like the AI is thinking. But bro, it's just predicting the next words based on the information it has. Meaning, these LLMs are very powerful, very amazing — but they're not perfect. Sometimes they give a lot of wrong information too. So don't rely 100% on their information — doing your own research is important too.

So in today's blog, you got to know about LLMs. And we'll meet again in the next chapter.