Summary
This chapter provided a foundational understanding of LLMs and introduced the role of design patterns in their development. It traced the evolution of language models from early statistical approaches to the transformer architecture-based LLMs of today, emphasizing key features such as the self-attention mechanism, the significance of scale and computational resources, few-shot learning, language understanding and generation capabilities, and multilingual abilities.
Then, this chapter transitioned to the importance of design patterns, drawing parallels with their established role in software engineering. This highlighted the benefits of applying design patterns to LLM development, outlining a structured approach for improving data quality, optimizing training, addressing model quality and alignment, enhancing reasoning capabilities, integrating external knowledge through RAG, and developing agentic applications. Then, the 29 patterns that will be explored throughout this...