How an LLM learns
The diagram demonstrates this process by showing the progression from examples → numerical representations → learned patterns → contextual prediction → generated text . This simplified model helps explain why an LLM can produce new sentences that were not necessarily copied directly from a particular source. Artificial intelligence has become increasingly important in education, especially with the development of AI tools that can produce text, images, summaries, and other forms of content. One of the technologies behind many text-based AI systems is the large language model (LLM). Understanding how an LLM works is important for educators because it helps us use these tools responsibly rather than treating them as if they think and learn exactly like humans. An LLM is trained using very large collections of text. These collections can contain books, articles, websites, and other sources of language. During training, the model processes enormous numbers of examples and ...