Unveiling the Power of Large Language Models (LLMs)

Harishdatalab
5 min readJul 15, 2023

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Large Language Models (LLM) are game-changer in the evolution of Natural Language Processing tasks. LLMs are machine-learning models that use deep-learning algorithms to train large corpus of text to understand the underlying patterns and the complex relationship in the language.

The analyst says the NLP market will reach $35 Billion dollor by 2026.

LLM models are majorly driven by the volume of data and the number of parameters they are trained upon. According to NLP, Moore’s law is a hypothesis that the performance of natural language processing (NLP) models will continue to improve exponentially, following a similar trend to Moore’s law for the number of transistors on a chip. You can observe the exponential increase in the model size from the below graph. According to Moore’s Law, the model size is increasing by a factor of 10 year-on-year.

The Increasing Size of LLM Models

Another graph here from Microsoft which introduced its Turing Natural Language Generation (T-NLG) is a 17 billion parameter language model surpassing previous benchmarks in various downstream NLP tasks. To encourage academic feedback and research, Microsoft offers a demo showcasing T-NLG’s capabilities in freeform generation, question answering, and summarization. The curve doesn’t stop here we have many more models in the queue.

T-NLG LLM Model

Unveiling the Core Building Blocks of LLMs

To effectively process and comprehend natural language data, Large Language Models (LLMs) incorporate various fundamental components.

Important components of LLMs

a) Tokenization: Tokenization in Large Language Models (LLMs) involves dividing text into smaller units called tokens. Its goal is to create a standardized representation for efficient processing and analysis. LLMs utilize tokenization in tasks like language translation, sentiment analysis, and question answering to extract features and optimize computational resources.

b) Embedding: Embedding in Large Language Models (LLMs) aims to represent words or tokens as dense vectors in a continuous space. The objective is to capture semantic relationships and contextual information. LLMs utilize embedding for applications like word similarity, sentiment analysis, and text classification to enhance language understanding and information extraction.

c) Attention: Attention in Large Language Models (LLMs) refers to the mechanism that allows the model to focus on relevant parts of the input sequence. The objective is to assign importance weights to different elements, capturing contextual dependencies effectively. Attention is applied in tasks like machine translation, text summarization, and sentiment analysis, enhancing the model’s ability to process long-range dependencies and improve performance.

d) Pre-training: Pre-training in Large Language Models (LLMs) involves training a model on a large corpus of unlabeled text to learn general language representations. The objective is to capture the statistical properties of language and encode them in the model’s parameters. Pre-training is applied as a foundation for downstream tasks like text generation, sentiment analysis, and question answering, enabling better transfer learning and improved performance.

e) Transfer Learning: Transfer learning in Large Language Models (LLMs) refers to the process of leveraging knowledge gained from pre-training on one task and applying it to improve performance on a different downstream task. The objective is to transfer learned representations and linguistic knowledge. Transfer learning is applied in various natural language processing tasks, including sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and language translation, to enhance model performance, reduce training time, and mitigate the need for large labelled datasets.

Popular LLM Models:

Evolution of Prominent LLM Models: A Historical Timeline

I) BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers): Google introduced BERT, a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM), in 2018. Built on a transformer architecture, BERT excels in learning text representations and has achieved remarkable results on various NLP tasks like question answering, text classification, and language inference. With 340 million parameters, BERT empowers advanced language understanding and processing capabilities.

II) T5 (Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer): T5, a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) developed by Google, utilizes a transformer architecture to handle multiple natural language processing tasks. With its text-to-text transfer approach, T5 can adapt to diverse tasks with minimal fine-tuning. It boasts 11 billion parameters and was introduced in 2019, offering advanced capabilities for various NLP applications.

III) LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications): Google introduced LaMDA in July 2021, joining the ranks of other LLMs like GPT-3 and BERT. While LaMDA shares the ability to learn text representations for NLP tasks, it stands out with its exceptional characteristics. Boasting 1.6 trillion parameters, it surpasses the scale of most LLMs. LaMDA also employs the innovative Switch Transformer architecture, enabling seamless transitions between task-specific modules based on requirements.

IV) PaLM (Pathways Language Model): Introduced at Google AI’s I/O developer conference on May 10, 2022, PaLM is a groundbreaking dense decoder-only transformer model with 540 billion parameters. Trained on vast text and code datasets, PaLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in tasks like question answering, translation, and summarization. Its efficient and scalable Pathways architecture sets a new standard for LLM training, promising transformative advancements in computer interactions.

Trending Application of LLMs:

  1. Language Translation
  2. Constructing chat-bots
  3. Question Answering
  4. Text Summarization and Generation
  5. Machine Translation
  6. Sentimental Analysis
  7. Code Generation
  8. Object Recognition
  9. Image Captioning
  10. Predictive Analysis

Limitations of LLMs

I) Bias: The potential of language models is constrained by the textual data on which they are trained. Such limitations can result in the propagation of misinformation, bias, and potentially harmful language.

II) Contextual Dependencies: Large language models possess a finite memory capacity, and once the number of input tokens exceeds a certain limit, their ability to carry out the desired tasks becomes compromised.

III) Cost and Environmental Impact: The development of large language models necessitates significant investments in IT infrastructure, human resources, and energy consumption. LLM projects rely on numerous servers, resulting in a substantial carbon footprint due to their immense energy requirements.

— — — — — — — — — — — -Happy Learning!!!! — — — — — — — — — —

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