🧠 What are Large Language Models?
Large Language Models (LLMs) are neural networks trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like language. They represent a breakthrough in AI that has enabled applications like ChatGPT, GPT-4, Claude, and numerous other AI systems.
Scale
Billions to trillions of parameters trained on massive text corpora
Capabilities
Text generation, reasoning, code writing, translation, and more
Training
Self-supervised learning on next-token prediction with human feedback
🏗️ LLM Architectures
Transformer Architecture
Self-attention based architecture powering modern LLMs
Key Components
- • Multi-Head Attention
- • Feed-Forward Networks
- • Layer Normalization
- • Positional Encoding
Advantages
- • Parallelizable training
- • Long-range dependencies
- • Scalable to large sizes
Implementation Example
import torch
import torch.nn as nn
import math
class MultiHeadAttention(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, d_model, num_heads):
super().__init__()
self.d_model = d_model
self.num_heads = num_heads
self.d_k = d_model // num_heads
self.W_q = nn.Linear(d_model, d_model)
self.W_k = nn.Linear(d_model, d_model)
self.W_v = nn.Linear(d_model, d_model)
self.W_o = nn.Linear(d_model, d_model)
def scaled_dot_product_attention(self, Q, K, V, mask=None):
# Calculate attention scores
scores = torch.matmul(Q, K.transpose(-2, -1)) / math.sqrt(self.d_k)
if mask is not None:
scores = scores.masked_fill(mask == 0, -1e9)
attention_weights = torch.softmax(scores, dim=-1)
output = torch.matmul(attention_weights, V)
return output, attention_weights
def forward(self, query, key, value, mask=None):
batch_size = query.size(0)
# Linear projections
Q = self.W_q(query).view(batch_size, -1, self.num_heads, self.d_k).transpose(1, 2)
K = self.W_k(key).view(batch_size, -1, self.num_heads, self.d_k).transpose(1, 2)
V = self.W_v(value).view(batch_size, -1, self.num_heads, self.d_k).transpose(1, 2)
# Apply attention
attention_output, attention_weights = self.scaled_dot_product_attention(Q, K, V, mask)
# Concatenate heads
attention_output = attention_output.transpose(1, 2).contiguous().view(
batch_size, -1, self.d_model)
return self.W_o(attention_output)
class TransformerBlock(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, d_model, num_heads, d_ff, dropout=0.1):
super().__init__()
self.attention = MultiHeadAttention(d_model, num_heads)
self.norm1 = nn.LayerNorm(d_model)
self.norm2 = nn.LayerNorm(d_model)
self.feed_forward = nn.Sequential(
nn.Linear(d_model, d_ff),
nn.ReLU(),
nn.Linear(d_ff, d_model)
)
self.dropout = nn.Dropout(dropout)
def forward(self, x, mask=None):
# Self-attention with residual connection
attn_output = self.attention(x, x, x, mask)
x = self.norm1(x + self.dropout(attn_output))
# Feed-forward with residual connection
ff_output = self.feed_forward(x)
x = self.norm2(x + self.dropout(ff_output))
return x
# Example: GPT-style decoder-only model
class GPTModel(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, vocab_size, d_model, num_heads, num_layers, max_length):
super().__init__()
self.token_embedding = nn.Embedding(vocab_size, d_model)
self.position_embedding = nn.Embedding(max_length, d_model)
self.transformer_blocks = nn.ModuleList([
TransformerBlock(d_model, num_heads, d_model * 4)
for _ in range(num_layers)
])
self.ln_f = nn.LayerNorm(d_model)
self.head = nn.Linear(d_model, vocab_size, bias=False)
def forward(self, input_ids):
seq_length = input_ids.size(1)
# Create causal mask
mask = torch.tril(torch.ones(seq_length, seq_length)).unsqueeze(0).unsqueeze(0)
# Embeddings
positions = torch.arange(0, seq_length).expand(input_ids.size(0), seq_length)
x = self.token_embedding(input_ids) + self.position_embedding(positions)
# Transformer blocks
for block in self.transformer_blocks:
x = block(x, mask)
# Final layer norm and output projection
x = self.ln_f(x)
logits = self.head(x)
return logits
🎯 Training Phases
Objective
Next token prediction (autoregressive language modeling)
Data
Massive unlabeled text (books, web pages, articles)
Scale
Hundreds of billions to trillions of tokens
Implementation
# Pre-training objective: Predict next token
import torch
import torch.nn.functional as F
def pretraining_loss(model, input_ids):
"""
Autoregressive language modeling loss
"""
# Shift inputs: predict token at position i+1 given tokens 0..i
inputs = input_ids[:, :-1] # Remove last token
targets = input_ids[:, 1:] # Remove first token
# Forward pass
logits = model(inputs) # (batch_size, seq_len, vocab_size)
# Compute cross-entropy loss
loss = F.cross_entropy(
logits.reshape(-1, logits.size(-1)),
targets.reshape(-1),
ignore_index=-100 # Ignore padding tokens
)
return loss
# Training characteristics:
# - Self-supervised learning (no labels needed)
# - Massive scale (GPT-3: 300B tokens, PaLM: 780B tokens)
# - Emergent capabilities appear at scale
# - Foundation for all downstream tasks
class PreTrainingDataset:
def __init__(self, tokenizer, block_size=1024):
self.tokenizer = tokenizer
self.block_size = block_size
def tokenize_and_chunk(self, text):
"""Convert text to training examples"""
tokens = self.tokenizer.encode(text)
# Create overlapping chunks
examples = []
for i in range(0, len(tokens) - self.block_size, self.block_size):
chunk = tokens[i:i + self.block_size + 1] # +1 for target
examples.append(torch.tensor(chunk))
return examples
⚡ Core Capabilities
Text Generation
Generate coherent, contextually relevant text
Applications
Implementation
# Text generation with different strategies
import torch
import torch.nn.functional as F
def greedy_decode(model, input_ids, max_length=100):
"""Generate text using greedy decoding"""
generated = input_ids.clone()
for _ in range(max_length):
with torch.no_grad():
outputs = model(generated)
logits = outputs[:, -1, :] # Last token logits
next_token = torch.argmax(logits, dim=-1, keepdim=True)
generated = torch.cat([generated, next_token], dim=1)
# Stop if EOS token
if next_token.item() == tokenizer.eos_token_id:
break
return generated
def nucleus_sampling(model, input_ids, max_length=100, top_p=0.9, temperature=1.0):
"""Generate text using nucleus (top-p) sampling"""
generated = input_ids.clone()
for _ in range(max_length):
with torch.no_grad():
outputs = model(generated)
logits = outputs[:, -1, :] / temperature
# Apply nucleus sampling
sorted_logits, sorted_indices = torch.sort(logits, descending=True)
cumulative_probs = torch.cumsum(F.softmax(sorted_logits, dim=-1), dim=-1)
# Remove tokens with cumulative probability above threshold
sorted_indices_to_remove = cumulative_probs > top_p
sorted_indices_to_remove[..., 1:] = sorted_indices_to_remove[..., :-1].clone()
sorted_indices_to_remove[..., 0] = 0
indices_to_remove = sorted_indices_to_remove.scatter(1, sorted_indices, sorted_indices_to_remove)
logits[indices_to_remove] = -float('inf')
# Sample from the filtered distribution
probs = F.softmax(logits, dim=-1)
next_token = torch.multinomial(probs, num_samples=1)
generated = torch.cat([generated, next_token], dim=1)
return generated
# Advanced generation techniques:
# - Beam search: Maintain multiple hypotheses
# - Contrastive search: Balance coherence and diversity
# - Typical sampling: Sample from "typical" probability mass
📈 Scaling Laws & Emergent Abilities
Scaling Laws
- • Model size: More parameters → better performance
- • Data scale: More training data → better generalization
- • Compute budget: More compute → higher quality models
- • Power law relationships: Predictable scaling curves
Emergent Abilities
- • Chain-of-thought reasoning: Appears at ~10B parameters
- • In-context learning: Few-shot task adaptation
- • Complex instruction following: Multi-step task execution
- • Code generation: Programming in multiple languages
Key Insight
Many capabilities are not explicitly trained but emerge from scale. This suggests that language modeling is a powerful objective that captures many aspects of intelligence and reasoning.
⚠️ Limitations & Challenges
Current Limitations
- • Hallucination: Generate plausible but false information
- • Knowledge cutoff: Limited to training data time period
- • Context limits: Finite context window for long documents
- • Computational cost: Expensive inference and training
- • Alignment challenges: Difficult to ensure desired behavior
Active Research Areas
- • Retrieval-augmented generation: Connect to external knowledge
- • Tool use: Integration with calculators, APIs, databases
- • Constitutional AI: Self-improving safety mechanisms
- • Multimodal models: Text, images, audio, video
- • Efficient architectures: Mixture of experts, sparse models
🎯 Key Takeaways
Transformers revolutionized NLP: Self-attention enables parallel processing and captures long-range dependencies
Scale matters: Many capabilities emerge only at large model sizes and training scales
Training is multi-phase: Pre-training provides foundation, fine-tuning and RLHF align with human preferences
In-context learning is powerful: Models can adapt to new tasks with just examples in the prompt
Challenges remain: Hallucination, alignment, and computational efficiency are active research areas
Related Technologies for LLM Development
Transformers→
Core architecture powering modern LLMs
PyTorch→
Deep learning framework for LLM development
vLLM→
High-performance LLM serving and inference
Vector Databases→
Store and retrieve embeddings for RAG systems
MLflow→
Track LLM experiments and model versions
LLMs→
Production LLM platforms and APIs