Meaning of large language model | Babel Free

Definitions

A type of neural network specializing in language, typically including billions of parameters.

Equivalents

Examples

“GPT-3 belongs to a category of deep learning known as a large language model, a complex neural net that has been trained on a titanic data set of text: in GPT-3’s case, roughly 700 gigabytes of data drawn from across the web, including Wikipedia, supplemented with a large collection of text from digitized books. GPT-3 is the most celebrated of the large language models, and the most publicly available, but Google, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) and DeepMind have all developed their own L.L.M.s in recent years.”

“GPT-2 is a large language model with 1.5 billion parameters, trained on a dataset of 8 million web pages scraped from the internet.”

“Less charitable observers (like this columnist) see two alternative interpretations. One is that it’s an attempt to consolidate OpenAI’s lead over the rest of the industry in large language models (LLMs), because history suggests that regulation often enhances dominance.”

“Large language models work well because they’re so large. The latest models from OpenAI, Meta, and DeepSeek use hundreds of billions of “parameters” […] With more parameters, the models are better able to identify patterns and connections, which in turn makes them more powerful and accurate. But this power comes at a cost […] huge computational resources […] energy hogs […] In response, some researchers are now thinking small. IBM, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have all recently released small language models (SLMs) that use a few billion parameters—a fraction of their LLM counterparts.”

CEFR level