What is an LLM?
A Large Language Model (LLM) is a type of AI trained on massive amounts of text to understand and generate human language. GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and Llama are all LLMs.
12 min•By Priygop Team•Updated 2026
What Makes an LLM Large
The word 'large' refers to the number of parameters (weights) in the model.
Early language models (2015-2018) had millions of parameters.
Modern LLMs have billions or hundreds of billions of parameters.
GPT-2 (2019): 1.5 billion parameters
GPT-3 (2020): 175 billion parameters
GPT-4 (2023): estimated 1 trillion+ parameters
More parameters generally means the model can represent more complex patterns and knowledge. But more parameters also means more computing power to run and train.
Diagram
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Deep Learning ⊂ Machine Learning ⊂ Artificial Intelligence
What LLMs Can Do
- Answer questions in natural language about a vast range of topics
- Write and edit text in various styles and formats
- Summarize long documents into shorter versions
- Translate between languages
- Write, explain, and debug code in many programming languages
- Reason through problems step by step when prompted
- Have multi-turn conversations while tracking context
- Extract information from documents and classify text
Common LLMs and Their Makers
Common LLMs and Their Makers
# Overview of major LLMs (as of 2024)
llms = {
"GPT-4o": {
"maker": "OpenAI",
"access": "API and ChatGPT",
"strengths": "Reasoning, coding, vision, multimodal",
},
"Claude 3.5 Sonnet": {
"maker": "Anthropic",
"access": "API and Claude.ai",
"strengths": "Long context, reasoning, writing quality",
},
"Gemini 1.5 Pro": {
"maker": "Google DeepMind",
"access": "API and Gemini app",
"strengths": "Very long context (1M tokens), multimodal",
},
"Llama 3": {
"maker": "Meta AI",
"access": "Open source (can run locally)",
"strengths": "Free to use, customizable",
},
"Mistral Large": {
"maker": "Mistral AI",
"access": "API",
"strengths": "Efficient, multilingual",
},
}
print("Major Large Language Models:")
print()
for name, info in llms.items():
print(f" {name}")
print(f" Maker: {info['maker']}")
print(f" Access: {info['access']}")
print(f" Strengths: {info['strengths']}")
print()Quick Q&A
Key Takeaways
- A Large Language Model (LLM) is a type of AI trained on massive amounts of text to understand and generate human language.
- Answer questions in natural language about a vast range of topics
- Write and edit text in various styles and formats
- Summarize long documents into shorter versions