← Back to Portal

Large Language Models

Explore the revolutionary world of Large Language Models - from transformer architecture to modern applications

🏗️ Transformer Architecture

The foundation of modern LLMs. Transformers use self-attention mechanisms to process sequences in parallel, enabling better context understanding and faster training compared to recurrent architectures.

🔄 Attention Mechanisms

Self-attention allows models to weigh the importance of different words in a sequence, creating rich contextual representations that capture long-range dependencies and relationships.

📊 Scaling Laws

Empirical relationships showing how model performance improves with increased parameters, data, and compute. These laws guide the development of increasingly powerful language models.

🎯 Pre-training & Fine-tuning

LLMs are first pre-trained on massive text corpora to learn language patterns, then fine-tuned on specific tasks to achieve specialized performance.

Evolution of Language Models

2017
Transformer Architecture
"Attention is All You Need" paper introduces the transformer architecture, revolutionizing NLP with self-attention mechanisms and parallel processing.
2018
BERT & GPT-1
BERT introduces bidirectional training while GPT-1 demonstrates the power of autoregressive language modeling with 117M parameters.
2019
GPT-2
GPT-2 with 1.5B parameters shows emergent capabilities and initially withheld due to concerns about potential misuse.
2020
GPT-3
GPT-3's 175B parameters demonstrate few-shot learning capabilities, marking the beginning of the modern LLM era.
2022
ChatGPT & InstructGPT
Introduction of RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) creates more helpful, harmless, and honest AI assistants.
2023-2024
GPT-4 & Multimodal LLMs
Advanced reasoning capabilities and multimodal understanding, processing both text and images with unprecedented accuracy.

Popular Language Models

GPT-4
OpenAI
Most advanced language model with multimodal capabilities, excellent reasoning, and strong performance across diverse tasks.
Type: Autoregressive
Modality: Text + Images
Context: 128K tokens
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
Anthropic
Advanced AI assistant focused on being helpful, harmless, and honest, with strong analytical and creative capabilities.
Type: Constitutional AI
Context: 200K tokens
Focus: Safety & Reasoning
Gemini Ultra
Google
Multimodal AI model designed to understand and generate text, code, audio, image, and video content with state-of-the-art performance.
Type: Multimodal
Capabilities: Text, Code, Audio, Vision
Integration: Google Services
Llama 2
Meta
Open-source foundation model available in multiple sizes, enabling research and commercial applications with responsible AI practices.
Type: Open Source
Sizes: 7B, 13B, 70B
License: Custom Commercial

Key Concepts

🎯 Emergent Abilities

Capabilities that appear in large models but not smaller ones, such as few-shot learning, chain-of-thought reasoning, and complex instruction following.

🔧 Prompt Engineering

The art and science of crafting effective prompts to guide LLM behavior, including techniques like few-shot examples and chain-of-thought prompting.

🎖️ RLHF

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback aligns model outputs with human preferences, improving helpfulness while reducing harmful or biased responses.

🏗️ In-Context Learning

The ability to learn new tasks from examples provided in the input prompt, without updating model parameters through traditional training.

🔍 Hallucination

When models generate plausible-sounding but factually incorrect information, a key challenge in deploying LLMs for factual applications.

⚖️ Alignment

Ensuring AI systems behave in ways that are beneficial, safe, and aligned with human values and intentions.