LLM Course - Large Language Models

Understanding NLP and LLMs

What’s the difference?

• NLP (Natural Language Processing) is the broader field focused on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. NLP encompasses many techniques and tasks such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and machine translation.
• LLMs (Large Language Models) are a powerful subset of NLP models characterized by their massive size, extensive training data, and ability to perform a wide range of language tasks with minimal task-specific training. Models like the Llama, GPT, or Claude series are examples of LLMs that have revolutionized what’s possible in NLP

NLP is a field of linguistics and machine learning focused on understanding everything related to human language. The aim of NLP tasks is not only to understand single words individually, but to be able to understand the context of those words.

The following is a list of common NLP tasks, with some examples of each:

• Classifying whole sentences: Getting the sentiment of a review, detecting if an email is spam, determining if a sentence is grammatically correct or whether two sentences are logically related or not
• Classifying each word in a sentence: Identifying the grammatical components of a sentence (noun, verb, adjective), or the named entities (person, location, organization)
• Generating text content: Completing a prompt with auto-generated text, filling in the blanks in a text with masked words
• Extracting an answer from a text: Given a question and a context, extracting the answer to the question based on the information provided in the context
• Generating a new sentence from an input text: Translating a text into another language, summarizing a text

NLP isn’t limited to written text though. It also tackles complex challenges in speech recognition and computer vision, such as generating a transcript of an audio sample or a description of an image.

The Rise of Large Language Models (LLMs)

In recent years, the field of NLP has been revolutionized by Large Language Models (LLMs). These models, which include architectures like GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer)

A large language model (LLM) is an AI model trained on massive amounts of text data that can understand and generate human-like text, recognize patterns in language, and perform a wide variety of language tasks without task-specific training. They represent a significant advancement in the field of natural language processing (NLP).