What is…
LLM (Large Language Model)
A model trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next word — the engine behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok.
A large language model is a neural network trained on a vast slice of the internet, books and code to do one thing: predict what text comes next. Do that well enough, at enough scale, and you get something that can explain, summarize, write, translate and code.
It doesn't look facts up in a database. It generates each answer one piece at a time, based on patterns it learned during training — which is why it can be brilliant and occasionally, confidently wrong.
💡 Think of it like
The world's most well-read autocomplete — one that has read so much it can finish your thought, your essay, or your code.
📌 Example
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok are all apps built on top of LLMs.
🧠 Test yourself
Which of these describes LLM?
Related terms
Token
The chunk of text a model actually reads and writes — roughly ¾ of a word on average.
Parameters
The billions of internal numbers a model learns during training — its 'knowledge', stored as weights.
Transformer
The neural-network design (from Google, 2017) that nearly every modern AI model is built on.
Hallucination
When a model states something false — a fake quote, citation, or fact — with total confidence.
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