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TIWhat is an LLM? Let me break it down.
LLM stands for Large Language Model. It’s the technology behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Think of it like this. An LLM has read basically the entire internet. Books, articles, code, conversations. Trillions and trillions of words.
From all that reading, it learned patterns. How sentences flow. How ideas connect. How to answer questions. When you type something, it predicts the most likely next word, over and over, until you get a response. It’s pattern matching at an insane scale.
But here’s what gets interesting. Scale it up past 100 billion parameters and it starts doing things nobody programmed it to do. Scientists call these emergent capabilities. Force it to think step by step and something changes. Researchers are still debating whether that’s actual reasoning or just really convincing pattern matching.
But all of this is what an LLM is.
This is part of a new series where I’m explaining common tech terms. Follow along for more.
@timothybramlett
