Open Language Models

A Gentle Introduction to Open Source Large Language Models

Why everyone is talking about Llamas, Alpacas, Falcons and other animals

Image by the author (generated with Midjourney)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, you’ve witnessed the ChatGPT revolution and to how everyone seems unable to stop using it. In this article, we’ll explore its alternatives, jumping into the world of open source models. This first article of the series Open Language Models is helpful for people looking to get started and understand Open Source Large Language Models, and how and why to use them.

Table of contents

— Why do we need Open Source Models?
— The bigger the better? Training Large Language Models
— Fine-tuning Large Language Models
— The Best Open Source Large Language Models
— Running a Large Language Model on your computer
— Limitations
— Conclusion

What is a Large Language Model?

A Large Language Model (LLM) is an AI capable of understanding and generating human language. At the heart, there’s a type of neural network called a transformer, that…