Video transcript
How large language models work
GPT or generative pre trained transformer is a large language model or an LLM that can
generate human like text and I've been using GPT in its various forms for years. In this video,
we are going to number one, ask what is an LLM? Number two, we are going to describe how
they work. And then number three, we're going to ask what are the business applications of
LLMs.
So let's start with number one, what is a large language model. Well, a large language model is
an instance of something else, called a foundation model. Now, foundation models are pre
trained on large amounts of unlabeled and self-supervised data, meaning the model learns
from patterns in the data in the way that produces generalizable and adaptable output.
And large language models are instances of foundation models applied specifically to text and
text like things. I'm talking about things
like code. Now, large language models are trained on large data sets of text such as books,
articles, and conversations and look when we say large these models can be tens of gigabytes
in size and trained on enormous amounts of text data. We're talking potentially petabytes of
data here. So to put that into perspective, a text file that is let's say one gigabyte in size, that
can store about one hundred and seventy eight million words. A lot of words just in one GB.
And how many gigabytes are in a petabyte? Well, it's about one million yet that's truly a lot of
text.
LLS are also among the biggest models when it comes to parameter count. A parameter is a
value the model can change independently.
as it learns and the more parameters a model has the more complex it can be. GPT-3 for
example is pre trained on a corpus of actually forty-five terabytes of data and it uses a hundred
and seventy-five billion LLM parameters.
All right, so how do they work? Well, we can think of it like this. LLM equals three things – data,
architecture, and lastly, we can think of it as training. Those three things are really the
components of an LLM. Now, we've already discussed the enormous amounts of text data that
goes into these things. As for the architecture, this is a neural network and for GPT, that is a
transformer.
And the transformer architecture enables the model to handle sequences of data like
sentences or lines of code, and transformers are designed to understand the context of each
word in a sentence by considering it
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in relation to every other word. This allows the model to build a comprehensive understanding
of the sentence structure and the meaning of the words within it. And then this architecture is
trained on all of this large amount of data. During training, the model learns to predict the next
word in a sentence. So, “the sky is” it starts off with a random guess. “The sky is bug”. But with
each iteration, the model adjusts its internal parameters to reduce the difference between its
predictions and the actual outcomes. And the model keeps doing this gradually improving its
word predictions until it can reliably generate coherent sentences. Forget about “bug”, it can
figure out its “blue”.
Now, the model can be fine-tuned on a smaller more specific data set. Here the model refines
its understanding to be able to perform this specific task more accurately. Fine tuning is what
allows a general language model to become an expert at a specific task.
Okay, so how does this all fit into number three, business applications? Well, for customer
service applications, businesses can
use LLMs to create intelligent chatbots that can a variety of customer queries freeing up human
agents for more complex issues.
Another good field is content creation. That can benefit from LLMs which can help generate
articles, emails, social media posts, and even YouTube video scripts. Hm, there's an idea now.
LLMs can even contribute to software development, and they can do that by helping to
generate and review code. And that's just scratching the surface. As large language models
continue to evolve, we're bound to discover more innovative applications and that's why I’m so
enamored with large language models.
If you have any questions, please drop us a line below and if you want to see more videos like
this in the future, please like and subscribe.
Thanks for watching.
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