What Is a Large Language Model?

The one-sentence definition unpacked: a next-token predictor, not a database — and the vocabulary you need before anything else makes sense.

Content last verified 2026-09.

Lessons

1. The One-Sentence Definition, Unpacked
2. Not a Database, Not a Search Engine
3. Where LLMs Live: Apps, APIs, and Weights
4. The Words People Use

Sources

• Vaswani et al. (2017) — Attention Is All You Need (the transformer architecture)
• Brown et al. (2020) — Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (GPT-3)
• Ouyang et al. (2022) — Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback (InstructGPT)
• Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major & Shmitchell (2021) — On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots