Introduction to Large Language Models
Chapter 1: Understanding Large Language Models
What is Artificial Intelligence? A Brief Overview
Introducing Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Defining Large Language Models (LLMs)
How LLMs Learn from Text Data
Examples of Tasks LLMs Can Perform
Common Misconceptions about LLMs
Quiz for Chapter 1
Chapter 2: The Mechanics of LLMs (Simplified)
Representing Words: Tokens and Embeddings
Predicting the Next Word: The Core Idea
The Role of Training Data Size
Understanding Model Parameters
Introduction to Transformer Architecture (High-Level)
How Context Influences Generation
Quiz for Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Communicating with LLMs: Prompts
What is a Prompt?
Basic Prompting Techniques
Providing Instructions Clearly
Giving Examples (Few-Shot Prompting)
Controlling Output Length and Format
Common Prompting Challenges
Practice: Crafting Your First Prompts
Quiz for Chapter 3
Chapter 4: A Look at Different LLMs
Overview of Foundational Models
General Purpose vs. Specialized Models
Open vs. Closed Models: What's the Difference?
Understanding Model Size and Capabilities
Accessing Models: APIs and Interfaces
Quiz for Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Using Pre-trained LLMs
What are Pre-trained Models?
Finding and Choosing an LLM Service
Interacting via Web Interfaces
Introduction to Using LLM APIs
Sending Your First API Request
Interpreting LLM Responses
Hands-on Practical: Simple Text Generation Task
Quiz for Chapter 5
How LLMs Learn from Text Data
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- Attention Is All You Need, Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, 2017 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2017) DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762 - Introduces the Transformer architecture, which forms the basis for modern large language models and their learning mechanisms.
- Language Models are Few-Shot Learners, Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, Sandhini Agarwal, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Gretchen Krueger, Tom Henighan, Rewon Child, Aditya Ramesh, Daniel M. Ziegler, Jeffrey Wu, Clemens Winter, Christopher Hesse, Mark Chen, Eric Sigler, Mateusz Litwin, Scott Gray, Benjamin Chess, Jack Clark, Christopher Berner, Sam McCandlish, Alec Radford, Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, 2020 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020) DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2005.14165 - Details the training and capabilities of GPT-3, demonstrating how scaling up next-token prediction on vast datasets leads to powerful language understanding and generation.
- BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding, Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova, 2019 Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1810.04805 - Describes pre-training large Transformer models on massive text corpora using self-supervised tasks like masked language modeling, which is foundational for learning broad language representations.
- Speech and Language Processing, Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, 2025 (Stanford University) - Offers a comprehensive academic introduction to natural language processing, including the foundational theories of language models and neural network training.