Large Language Models ( Under 5 Mins)

A Product Manager’s Guide

Okay, let’s talk about Large Language Models (LLMs).

You’ve probably heard the buzz, maybe even used one.

But what are they really, and how can they impact the products you build?

This article is designed to give you understanding WITHOUT getting bogged down in technical jargon.

Think of this as your cheat sheet for understanding LLMs.

What Exactly Is an LLM?

At its heart, an LLM is a sophisticated mathematical function that does one key thing: predict the next word in a piece of text.

Imagine you have a movie script with a dialogue, but the AI’s responses are missing.

An LLM is like a magical machine that can fill in those blanks by predicting what word should come next, based on the preceding text.

It’s not just picking words randomly, though. It assigns probabilities to all possible words.

So, instead of saying “the” with 100% certainty, it might say there’s a 70% chance it’s “the,” a 15% chance it’s “a,” and so on.

This process is repeated over and over, word by word, to generate the complete response.