Introducing LLMs
The terms LLM and Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) are often used interchangeably but they’ve got their nuances:
- LLM is a more general term that refers to any language model with a large number (in the billions) of parameters that has been trained on vast amounts of text data and can perform a variety of language-related tasks, such as translation, summarization, question-answering, and more.
- GPT is a series of models developed by OpenAI. It’s like saying iPhone versus smartphones; the iPhone is a type of smartphone. Similarly, GPT is a type of LLM. The “transformer” part refers to the architecture they’re built on, a groundbreaking model structure introduced in 2017 that’s particularly good at handling sequences of data, like sentences in a text. While all GPT models are based on the Transformer architecture, not all LLMs must be.
So, every GPT is an LLM, but not every LLM is a GPT.
