Gen AI Foundational Information
Gen AI Foundational Information
Introduction
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a sesimic shift in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Their ability to process, generate and understand user intent is fundamentally changing the way we interact with information and technology.
An LLM is an advanced artificial intelligence system that specializes in processing,understanding, and generating human-like text. These systems are typically implemented as a deep neural network and are trained on massive amounts of text data. This allows them to learn the intricate patterns of language, giving them the ability to perform a variety of tasks, like machine translation, creative text generation, question answering, text summarization, and many more reasoning and language oriented tasks.
Why language models are important
- LLMs achieve an impressive performance boost from the previous state of the art NLP models across a variety of different and complex tasks which require answering questions or complex reasoning, making feasible many new applications. These include language translation, text summarization, text generation, question answering, code generation, sentiment analysis, etc.
- Although foundational LLMs trained in a variety of tasks on large amounts of data, perform very well out of the box and display emergent behaviours (e.g. the ability to perform tasks they have not been directly trained for) they can also be adapted to solve specific tasks where performance out of the box is not at the level desired through a process known as fine-tuning. This requires significantly less data and computational resources than training an LLM from scratch.
- LLMs can be further nudged and guided towards the desired behavior by the discipline of prompt engineering: the art and science of composing the prompt and the parameters of an LLM to get the desired response.