LLM (large language model)
An LLM is a program trained on huge amounts of text to continue a piece of text one chunk at a time: it works out which chunk is likeliest to come next and writes it. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all run on an LLM.
Select any words here to ask your Maestro about them.
The model is writing "The customer paid with a...". How does it pick the next word?
What it's for: an LLM (large language model) is the engine inside assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot. It handles anything done in language: drafting, summarizing, translating, explaining, sorting text and writing code. Inside an AI agent, it also decides which tool to use at each step.
How it works, briefly: it reads your text as tokens and writes its answer one token at a time, each one the token that seems likeliest after everything before it. What it "knows" it learned from the text it was trained on, and it can only use what's in its context window: your prompt, the files you give it and its own answer so far.
That's why it sounds sure of itself even when it's wrong: it isn't checking a table of facts, it's continuing the text. When the likeliest continuation isn't true, you get a hallucination. With numbers, ask it to show where each one came from, and recompute the ones that matter.
In Your AI and your data, you practice asking it for numbers you can check.
How it's used
Same question, three answers
Write a subject line for the email with October's sales report.
- 1st try: October sales report
- 2nd try: How October went: sales by store
- 3rd try: October sales, ready for your reviewAll three are reasonable: it picks among likely continuations, it doesn't look up the one right answer.
When to look closer
What does the model do on its own?
What an LLM seems to do
- Knows what was in the text it was trained on, up to a date
- Reads the file you upload
- Searches the web every time you ask
- Remembers what you talked about last week
Which of these four does the model do by itself, without help from the app?
Ask your Maestro about LLM
It answers from the free course page closest to this word, the way it answers while you study.
You: What does "LLM" mean, in plain words?
Your Maestro: I'll explain it with a case of yours: it sticks better than a definition. What task at work do you use an LLM for today?
Asking about: Answers from the page "Why won't pandas add up my amounts? Numbers stored as text"
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Related terms
- Token (in AI)
A token is the piece of text a language model reads and writes in: sometimes a whole word, sometimes part of a word, a number or a punctuation mark. Models count their limits and their cost in tokens.
- Context window
Everything a language model has in front of it at a given moment: your instruction, the files it has read and the results of its tools. What isn't in the context, the model can't use.
- AI agent
A program that pairs a language model with tools, such as terminal commands and files, to carry out a task in several steps: it reads its context, acts, looks at the result and repeats.