28 Dec WHAT ARE LLMs? KEYNOTE SPEAKER ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE LEARNING EXPLAINS
LLM keynote speakers reveal that the phrase is short for large language models. Such high-tech offerings are a type of artificial intelligence system that is trained on large volumes of text data. Systems work by looking for statistical patterns in the text they are trained on, which LLM keynote speakers say allows them to predict the next word in a sequence or to generate new text that has similarities to their training data.
A number of important points that you should be aware of when it comes to large language models going forward are as follows:
- Data Size – Per top LLM keynote speakers, systems require massive datasets to train on, often billions of words from websites, books, articles and more. The large volume of text is why they are called “large” language models.
- Self-Supervised Learning – LLMs are self-supervised, meaning they train by predicting masked out words in sentences rather than needing humans to manually label the data. It allows models to learn from vast datasets that would be infeasible for people to annotate.
- Foundation Models – According to the best LLM keynote speakers, systems are considered “foundation models” because they can be adapted and fine-tuned for various downstream tasks like question answering, summarization, and language translation without needing to train a full model from scratch.
- Transformer Architecture – Most modern LLMs use a transformer-based neural network architecture. Self-attention layers allow the model to understand relationships between words based on the full context in the text.
- Pre-Trained Models – Groups like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic release pre-trained LLMs so others can utilize the models for various applications by fine-tuning on smaller datasets. Examples that LLM keynote speakers often cite would be GPT-3/4, PaLM, and Claude.
- Safety and Ethics – As LLMs become more advanced in generating human-like text, researchers need to address concerns around potential misuse, bias, and false information spread by the models. Appropriate safety measures are an active area of development.
The way the industry’s most successful and well-known LLM keynote speakers put it, systems leverage self-supervised learning on massive text datasets to create foundation models that understand language in context. The technology’s versatility makes it a fundamental tool for advancing many areas of natural language AI. However, systems’ societal impact necessitates ethical considerations as well. And that’s why you’ll continue to hear about large language models and the technology and companies behind them throughout 2024, 2025 and the many years to come.