AI Glossary Term
What does “Large Language Model (LLM)” mean?
A language model trained on massive text corpora to generate and analyze text.
How Large Language Model (LLM) works
Example
When you ask a chatbot to draft an email, an LLM predicts one token at a time, each chosen based on your prompt and what it has already written. Repeated many times, this produces a complete message.
Why it matters
LLMs power chatbots, writing aids, and coding assistants. They are powerful but can state falsehoods fluently, so their output needs judgment.
Common questions
Does an LLM understand language?
It models statistical patterns of language very well, but whether that amounts to understanding is debated.
What does 'large' refer to?
The number of parameters and the amount of training data, often billions of parameters and trillions of tokens.
Are LLMs searching a database?
No. They generate from learned parameters, although they can be connected to search or retrieval tools.