Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Day 2/42: What is an LLM?
Yesterday, we zoomed out and defined Generative AI.
Today, we zoom in on the star of the show: LLMs.
An LLM isn’t a brain. It’s not a database.
It’s a very powerful autocomplete system.
At every step, it asks one question only:
“Given everything so far, what’s the most likely next token?”
That’s it. One token at a time. Again and again.
No understanding. No intent. Just probability stacked thousands of times until it *looks* like intelligence.
Once you really get this, a lot of weird behavior suddenly makes sense:
why answers drift, why wording matters, why confidence doesn’t equal correctness.
Missed Day 1? Start there.
Tomorrow, we open the hood and talk about the first hidden building block: tokens.
I’m Louis-François, PhD dropout, now CTO & co-founder at Towards AI. Follow me for tomorrow’s no-BS AI roundup 🚀
#LLM #AIExplained #GenerativeAI #short
Day 2/42: What is an LLM?
Yesterday, we zoomed out and defined Generative AI.
Today, we zoom in on the star of the show: LLMs.
An LLM isn’t a brain. It’s not a database.
It’s a very powerful autocomplete system.
At every step, it asks one question only:
“Given everything so far, what’s the most likely next token?”
That’s it. One token at a time. Again and again.
No understanding. No intent. Just probability stacked thousands of times until it *looks* like intelligence.
Once you really get this, a lot of weird behavior suddenly makes sense:
why answers drift, why wording matters, why confidence doesn’t equal correctness.
Missed Day 1? Start there.
Tomorrow, we open the hood and talk about the first hidden building block: tokens.
I’m Louis-François, PhD dropout, now CTO & co-founder at Towards AI. Follow me for tomorrow’s no-BS AI roundup 🚀
#LLM #AIExplained #GenerativeAI #short
