What are language models?

A language model is like a super-smart friend who can guess what you’re going to say next, and even help you write stories or answer questions.

Imagine you have a toy box full of letter blocks, each one labeled with a word. Your friend knows all the words in the box and how they usually fit together. When you start saying a sentence, like “The cat is,” your friend looks at the blocks and picks the most likely next word, maybe “sleeping” or “running.” That’s what a language model does, but with millions of words instead of just a few letter blocks.

Language models learn by reading lots and lots of books, websites, and messages. The more they read, the better they get at guessing what comes next, like how you learn to tell a joke by hearing it over and over again.

Once they’re trained, they can help you write stories, answer questions, or even chat with you like a friend. It’s like having a robot who grew up reading all your favorite books, they know exactly what you might say next!