What Is a Large Language Model (LLM)?

A large language model (LLM) is an AI model trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate human language — the technology behind tools like GPT, Claude, and Gemini.

A large language model (LLM) is an AI model trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate human language. LLMs power tools like OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini.

Why they matter

LLMs can write, summarize, translate, classify, reason over text, and answer questions — making them the engine of modern generative AI. For business use, they’re typically combined with RAG to ground them in private, current data.

Key concepts

LLMs have a training cutoff (they don’t know recent or private information by default), can hallucinate (state false things confidently), and vary in cost, latency, and capability. Choosing and grounding the right model for a task is a core part of generative AI consulting.

See generative AI and fine-tuning.


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