Visual Guides to understand the basics of Large Language Models

A compilation of tools and articles that intuitively break down the complicated AI concepts

Image by the author using free illustrations by unDraw.co

This is a living document and will be continually updated.

Today, the world is abuzz with LLMs, short for Large Language models. Not a day passes without the announcement of a new language model, fueling the fear of missing out in the AI space. Yet, many still struggle with the basic concepts of LLMs, making it challenging to keep pace with the advancements. This article is aimed at those who would like to dive into the inner workings of such AI models to have a solid grasp of the subject. With this in mind, I present a few tools and articles that can help solidify the concepts and break down the concepts of LLMs so they can be easily understood.

Table of Contents

· The Illustrated Transformer by Jay Alammar
· The Illustrated GPT-2 by Jay Alammar
· Transformer Explainer: Interactive Learning of Text-Generative Models
· Blue1Brown’s LLM Resources
· LLM Visualization by Brendan Bycroft
· Visual Guides by Maarten Grootendorst
∘ 1. A Visual Guide to Mamba and State Space Models
∘ 2. A Visual Guide to Quantization
∘ 3. A Visual Guide to Mixture of Experts (MoE)
· Generative AI exists because of the…