Understanding LLMs
In this section, we will highlight the core concepts of LLMs, exploring their evolution, underlying principles, and the transformative impact they have had on the AI landscape. We will examine the key components that make LLMs so powerful, the challenges they present, and the ongoing developments shaping their future.
The evolution of language models
The journey toward modern LLMs has been marked by significant paradigm shifts in natural language processing, as illustrated in the timeline shown in Figure 1.1:

Figure 1.1 – Evolution of language models
Early statistical approaches, while groundbreaking, were limited in capturing the nuances of human language. The advent of neural networks, particularly recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, allowed for better handling of sequential data and improved the ability to capture longer-term dependencies in text. Capturing longer-term dependencies...