Data & AI
An LLM is a type of AI model trained on massive text datasets to understand and generate human language, capable of tasks such as question answering, summarisation, code generation, and conversational dialogue.
LLMs are built on the Transformer neural network architecture and trained via self-supervised learning on trillions of tokens of text, allowing them to develop broad linguistic and factual knowledge without task-specific labelling. The scale of these models — billions to hundreds of billions of parameters — enables emergent capabilities that smaller models lack, such as multi-step reasoning, instruction following, and few-shot learning from examples in the prompt. Businesses deploy LLMs through hosted APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini) or by fine-tuning open-source models (Llama, Mistral) on proprietary data for domain-specific applications. Key considerations for production LLM deployment include prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for grounding responses in current data, latency, cost per token, and output reliability.
Example
A legal tech company builds a contract review tool by fine-tuning an open-source LLM on thousands of annotated legal documents, enabling it to flag non-standard clauses with higher accuracy than general-purpose models.
Related terms
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the field of computer science concerned with building systems that can perform tasks requiring human-like intelligence — such as reasoning, language understanding, visual perception, and decision-making.
Machine Learning
Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence in which systems learn to make predictions or decisions by identifying patterns in data, rather than being explicitly programmed with rules.
API (Application Programming Interface)
An API is a defined set of rules and protocols that allows one software application to request and exchange data or functionality with another, acting as a structured contract between systems.
SaaS (Software as a Service)
SaaS is a cloud delivery model in which software is hosted by a provider and accessed by users over the internet via a browser or thin client, with no local installation required.
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