LLM (large language model)
A language model with enough parameters and training data to produce coherent multi-paragraph text. Modern LLMs are transformers with billions to trillions of parameters.
There is no exact size threshold — "large" is a moving target. In practice, the term covers transformer-based language models from a few hundred million parameters upward, trained on hundreds of billions of tokens.
Companion explanation in Step by Token, chapter 1.
Where this term gets built
- ch. 1The dumbest model that exists
- ch. 3Train your own tokens
- ch. 8An attention head by hand
- ch. 10The full transformer block
- ch. 12The minimum code
- ch. 14Generation and sampling
- ch. 15Load real weights
- ch. 16Why your model talks badly
- ch. 19Simple quantization
- ch. 20Talk to your model
- ch. 21Ship a useful one
- ch. 23Appendix · RLHF and DPO
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