Large Language Models (LLMs)

Large Language Models (LLM)

A Large Language Model (LLM) is an AI model designed to process and understand human language on a large scale. These models are typically built using ‘Deep Learning’ techniques and are trained on massive datasets containing text from various sources, such as books, articles, and websites.

One of the most well-known Large Language Models is OpenAI's GPT series, with GPT-3 and GPT-4 being the most recent and advanced versions as of Mid-2023. These models can perform a wide range of tasks, such as answering questions, summarizing text, generating text, translating languages, creating images from Text, and more, by understanding context and relationships between words, phrases, images in the input text.

ChatGPT has shown that these Large Language Models can do amazing things and since Microsoft released something, the general public suddenly became aware of stuff that only big companies have been aware of for the last five years.

The following is a table comparing the current LLM's:

When we use the term 'Large language Models' does it mean text only?

The term "Large Language Models" typically refers to models that are specifically designed and trained to understand, generate, and manipulate Natural Language text. These models are trained on massive amounts of text data to learn patterns, structures, and relationships within the language, enabling them to perform various language-related tasks such as text generation, translation, summarization, and sentiment analysis, among others.

However, technology has now advanced and large language models, like OpenAI's DALL-E, have been extended to handle tasks beyond text processing, such as generating images from textual descriptions. In such cases, the model is still primarily a language model but has been adapted and trained on additional data (text-image pairs, in the case of DALL-E) to enable it to perform tasks that involve both text and images.

How does a Large Language Model (LLM) work?

Large Language Models, such as OpenAI's GPT series, work using deep learning techniques, specifically a type of Artificial Neural Network called the ‘Transformer Architecture’. These models are trained on vast amounts of text data, learning to understand the patterns, structures, and relationships between words and phrases in human language. Here's a high-level overview of how they work:

Data preprocessing: The input text data is tokenized, which means breaking it down into smaller units (tokens), such as words or ‘subword’ units. Each token is then assigned a unique numerical identifier. This process converts the raw text into a format that can be fed into the neural network.

Embeddings: The numerical identifiers for each token are mapped to continuous vectors in a high-dimensional space, called embeddings. Embeddings capture semantic information and relationships between words, enabling the model to understand context and meaning.

Transformer architecture: The Transformer Architecture is the backbone of Large Language Models like GPT. It consists of layers of self-attention mechanisms and feedforward networks, arranged in a stack. These layers help the model process input tokens in parallel, capturing dependencies and relationships between them. The self-attention mechanism allows the model to weigh the importance of different tokens in the input sequence when generating an output.

Training: During training, the model is fed with input-output pairs from a large dataset. The goal is to predict the next token in a sequence, given the previous tokens. The model learns to generate contextually relevant output by adjusting its internal parameters to minimize the difference between its predictions and the actual next tokens in the training data. This process involves backpropagation, a common optimization technique used in deep learning.

Fine-tuning: To make a large language model more useful for specific tasks, it can be fine-tuned using smaller, task-specific datasets. This process adapts the model to generate more accurate and relevant output for the given task, such as question-answering, summarization, translation, or sentiment analysis.

Inference: Once trained, the model can be used to perform various tasks. When given an input sequence, it processes the tokens using the learned embeddings and transformer layers, generating a probability distribution over the possible next tokens. The model then selects the most likely next token or samples from the distribution to generate contextually relevant output.

Large Language Models can perform a wide range of tasks by leveraging their understanding of context and relationships between words and phrases in the input text. They can generate human-like text, answer questions, translate languages, and more, making them incredibly versatile and powerful tools in natural language processing.

Real world example of a Large Language Model?

OpenAI's GPT-4 (short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a prominent example of a Large Language Model. GPT-4 is one of the most advanced language models available, with nearly 1 trillion parameters, and it is trained on a wide range of internet text sources. It has been used in various applications, including:

Chatbots: GPT-4 can be used to create conversational AI chatbots that can understand user inputs, provide relevant information, and engage in human-like interactions. For instance, the AI Dungeon game uses GPT-3 to generate interactive, dynamic, and immersive text-based adventure experiences.

Text summarization: ChatGPT can analyze long pieces of text and generate concise summaries that capture the main ideas and information.

Translation: It can be used to translate text from one language to another with a high degree of accuracy and fluency.

Content generation: It can generate human-like text for various purposes, such as blog posts, articles, or marketing materials, based on a given prompt or topic.

Code completion: It can be used in software development to suggest and autocomplete code snippets, helping developers write code more efficiently.

Sentiment analysis: It can analyze the sentiment of a piece of text, determining whether it is positive, negative, or neutral, which can be useful for understanding customer feedback, social media posts, or reviews.

These are just a few examples of the real-world applications of GPT-4, demonstrating the versatility and power of Large Language Models. Keep in mind that GPT-4 is one example of a Large Language Model, and there are other models, such as BERT, T5, and RoBERTa, that have been used in various natural language processing tasks.

Some of the Large Datasets that LLM's are trained on

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained on diverse and extensive corpora of text data. These datasets often come from the internet and include a wide variety of text types to provide a broad understanding of human language. Here are a few examples of large-scale datasets often used in training LLMs:

Common Crawl: This is a regularly updated dataset that provides petabytes of data collected over 10+ years of internet history. It includes text from web pages across many languages, and it's one of the largest publicly available web archives. The diversity and size of Common Crawl make it an attractive resource for training LLMs.

Wikipedia: Wikipedia provides a vast corpus of text on a wide variety of topics, making it an excellent resource for training LLMs. There are readily available dumps of Wikipedia text in various languages.

Books1 and Books2: These are large datasets containing the text of a large number of books, which provide LLMs with exposure to long-form, structured text on a variety of topics.

WebText: A dataset used by OpenAI for training its GPT models, WebText contains a large amount of text data scraped from the internet. The specifics of the dataset are proprietary to OpenAI, and it is not publicly available.

Other specific large-scale datasets: Depending on the aim of the model, other specialized large-scale datasets might be included. Examples could be scientific literature, legal documents, news articles, etc.

It's important to note that the exact datasets used in training specific LLMs, such as GPT-4 and GPT-4, are often not publicly disclosed and may include proprietary data or data obtained under specific licensing agreements. Therefore, while the above datasets are representative examples, they may not reflect the exact data used to train any specific LLM.

In summary, the term "Large Language Models" generally refers to models that focus on processing text, but some of these models have been extended to handle tasks that involve other modalities, such as images. The primary focus of large language models, however, remains on understanding, generating, and manipulating natural language text.