Also known as: LLM
In plain English
An LLM is the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. It has read an enormous amount of text and learned how language works, so it can answer questions, write and summarise.
In practice
LLMs are general-purpose: the same model can draft a contract clause, write code and analyse customer feedback. Treat outputs as drafts that need checking, keep sensitive data out of public tools, and match the model size to the task's value.
Under the hood
An LLM is usually a decoder-only transformer with billions of parameters, pre-trained to predict the next token over large text corpora and then post-trained to follow instructions. Its abilities come from scale in parameters, data and compute.
Example
"We're comparing three LLMs for our customer service assistant."