LLMs at Interview Altitude

Know the Vocabulary

This lesson uses the terms below many times. Read them once now, and come back here when a later section needs one.

• Large language model (LLM): A model trained on a very large amount of text that writes text. It reads some text and predicts the text that should come next.
• Token: The unit of text an LLM reads, writes, and is billed in. For rough estimates, one token is about three-quarters of an English word.
• Prompt: The sequence of tokens sent to the model in one call. It holds instructions, the conversation history, and sometimes documents.