O

ver the past few years, we have

taken a gigantic leap forward in
our decades-long quest to build
intelligent machines: the advent of the large
language model, or LLM.

This technology, based on research that

tries to model the human brain, has led to a
new field known as generative AI —
software that can create plausible and
sophisticated text, images and computer
code at a level that mimics human ability.

Businesses around the world have begun to

experiment with the new technology in the
belief it could transform media, finance,
law and professional services, as well as
public services such as education. The LLM
is underpinned by a scientific development
known as the transformer model, made by
Google researchers in 2017.

“While we’ve always understood the

breakthrough nature of our transformer
work, several years later, we’re energised by
its enduring potential across new fields,
from healthcare to robotics and security,
enhancing human creativity, and more,”
says Slav Petrov, a senior researcher at
Google, who works on building AI models,
including LLMs.

LLMs’ touted benefits — the ability to

increase productivity by writing and
analysing text — are also why it poses a
threat to humans. According to Goldman
Sachs, it could expose the equivalent of
300mn full-time workers across big
economies to automation, leading to
widespread unemployment.

As the technology is rapidly woven into our

lives, understanding how LLMs generate
text means understanding why these
models are such versatile cognitive engines
— and what else they can help create.
To write text, LLMs must first translate words into
a language they understand.
First a block of words is broken into tokens —
basic units that can be encoded. Tokens often
represent fractions of words, but we’ll turn each full
word into a token.
 work
In order to grasp a word’s meaning, work in our
example, LLMs first observe it in context using
enormous sets of training data, taking note of
nearby words . These datasets are based on
collating text published on the internet, with new
LLMs trained using billions of words.
Eventually, we end up with a huge set of the words
found alongside work in the training data, as
well as those that weren’t found near it.
As the model processes this set of words, it
produces a vector — or list of values — and adjusts
it based on each word’s proximity to work in the
training data. This vector is known as a word
embedding.
A word embedding can have hundreds of values,
each representing a different aspect of a word’s
meaning. Just as you might describe a house by its
characteristics — type, location, bedrooms,
bathrooms, storeys — the values in an embedding
quantify a word’s linguistic features.
The way these characteristics are derived means
we don’t know exactly what each value represents,
but words we expect to be used in comparable
ways often have similar-looking embeddings.
A pair of words like sea and ocean , for example,
may not be used in identical contexts (‘all at ocean’
isn't a direct substitute for ‘all at sea’), but their
meanings are close to each other, and embeddings
allow us to quantify that closeness.
By reducing the hundreds of values each
embedding represents to just two, we can see the
distances between these words more clearly.
We might spot clusters of pronouns , or modes of
transportation , and being able to quantify words
in this way is the first step in a model generating
text.
But this alone is not what makes LLMs so
clever. What unlocked their abilities to
parse and write as fluently as they do today
is a tool called the transformer, which
radically sped up and augmented how
computers understood language.

Transformers process an entire sequence at

once — be that a sentence, paragraph or an
entire article — analysing all its parts and
not just individual words.

This allows the software to capture context

and patterns better, and to translate — or
generate — text more accurately. This
simultaneous processing also makes LLMs
much faster to train, in turn improving
their efficiency and ability to scale.

Research outlining the transformer model

was first published by a group of eight AI
researchers at Google in June 2017. Their
11-page research paper marked the start of
the generative AI era.

I have no interest
A key concept of the transformer architecture is
self-attention. This is what allows LLMs to
understand relationships between words.
Self-attention looks at each token in a body of
text and decides which others are most important
to understanding its meaning.
Before transformers, the state of the art AI
translation methods were recurrent neural
networks (RNNs), which scanned each word in a
sentence and processed it sequentially.
With self-attention, the transformer computes all
the words in a sentence at the same time.
Capturing this context gives LLMs far more
sophisticated capabilities to parse language.
In this example, assessing the whole sentence at
once means the transformer is able to understand
that interest is being used as a noun to explain an
individual’s take on politics.
If we tweak the sentence . . .
. . . the model understands interest is now being
used in a financial sense.
And when we combine the sentences, the model is
still able to recognise the correct meaning of each
word thanks to the attention it gives the
accompanying text.

For the first use of interest, it is no and in that

are most attended.
For the second, it is rate and bank .
This functionality is crucial for advanced text
generation. Without it, words that can be
interchangeable in some contexts but not others
can be used incorrectly.
Effectively, self-attention means that if a summary
of this sentence was produced, you wouldn’t have
enthusiasm used when you were writing about
interest rates.
This capability goes beyond words, like interest,
that have multiple meanings.
In the following sentence, self-attention is able to
calculate that it is most likely to be referring to
dog .
And if we alter the sentence, swapping hungry for
delicious , the model is able to recalculate, with
it now most likely to refer to bone .
The benefits of self-attention for language
processing increase the more you scale things up.
It allows LLMs to take context from beyond
sentence boundaries, giving the model a greater
understanding of how and when a word is used.
One of the world’s largest and most
advanced LLMs is GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest
artificial intelligence model which the
company says exhibits “human-level
performance” on several academic and
professional benchmarks such as the US
bar exam, advanced placement tests and
the SAT school exams.

GPT-4 can generate and ingest large

volumes of text: users can feed in up to
25,000 English words, which means it
could handle detailed financial
documentation, literary works or technical
manuals.

The product has reshaped the tech industry,

with the world’s biggest technology
companies — including Google, Meta and
Microsoft, who have backed OpenAI —
racing to dominate the space, alongside
smaller start-ups.

The LLMs they have released include

Google’s PaLM model, which powers its
chatbot Bard, Anthropic’s Claude model,
Meta’s LLaMA and Cohere’s Command,
among others.

While these models are already being

adopted by an array of businesses, some of
the companies behind them are facing legal
battles around their use of copyrighted text,
images and audio scraped from the web.
The reason for this is that current LLMs are
trained on most of the English-language
internet — a volume of information that
makes them far more powerful than
previous generations.

From this enormous corpus of words and

images, the models learn how to recognise
patterns and eventually predict the next
best word.
After tokenising and encoding a prompt, we’re left
with a block of data representing our input as the
machine understands it, including meanings,
positions and relationships between words.
At its simplest, the model’s aim is now to predict
the next word in a sequence and do this repeatedly
until the output is complete.
To do this, the model gives a probability score to
each token, which represents the likelihood of it
being the next word in the sequence.
And it continues to do this until it is happy with the
text it has produced.
But this method of predicting the following word in
isolation — known as “greedy search” — can
introduce problems. Sometimes, while each
individual token might be the next best fit, the full
phrase can be less relevant.

Not necessarily always wrong, but perhaps not

what you’d expect either.
Transformers use a number of approaches to
address this problem and enhance the quality of
their output. One example is called beam search .

Rather than focusing only on the next word in a

sequence, it looks at the probability of a larger set
of tokens as a whole.
With beam search, the model is able to consider
multiple routes and find the best option.
This produces better results, ultimately leading to
more coherent, human-like text.
But things don’t always go to plan. While
the text may seem plausible and coherent, it
isn’t always factually correct. LLMs are not
search engines looking up facts; they are
pattern-spotting engines that guess the next
best option in a sequence.

Because of this inherent predictive nature,

LLMs can also fabricate information in a
process that researchers call
“hallucination”. They can generate made-up
numbers, names, dates, quotes — even web
links or entire articles.

Users of LLMs have shared examples of

links to non-existent news articles on the
FT and Bloomberg, made-up references to
research papers, the wrong authors for
published books and biographies riddled
with factual mistakes.

In one high-profile incident in New York, a

lawyer used ChatGPT to create a brief for a
case. When the defence interrogated the
report, they discovered it was littered with
made-up judicial opinions and legal
citations. “I did not comprehend that
ChatGPT could fabricate cases,” the lawyer
later told a judge during his own court
hearing.

Although researchers say hallucinations

will never be completely erased, Google,
OpenAI and others are working on limiting
them through a process known as
“grounding”. This involves cross-checking
an LLM’s outputs against web search
results and providing citations to users so
they can verify.
Humans are also used to provide feedback
and fill gaps in information — a process
known as reinforcement learning by human
feedback (RLHF) — which further improves
the quality of the output. But it is still a big
research challenge to understand which
queries might trigger these hallucinations,
as well as how they can be predicted and
reduced.

Despite these limitations, the transformer

has resulted in a host of cutting-edge AI
applications. Apart from powering chatbots
such as Bard and ChatGPT, it drives
autocomplete on our mobile keyboards and
speech recognition in our smart speakers.

Its real power, however, lies beyond

language. Its inventors discovered that
transformer models could recognise and
predict any repeating motifs or patterns.
From pixels in an image, using tools such as
Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, to
computer code using generators like
GitHub CoPilot. It could even predict notes
in music and DNA in proteins to help
design drug molecules.

For decades, researchers built specialised

models to summarise, translate, search and
retrieve. The transformer unified all those
actions into a single structure capable of
performing a huge variety of tasks.

“Take this simple model that predicts the

next word and it . . . can do anything,” says
Aidan Gomez, chief executive of AI start-up
Cohere, and a co-author of the transformer
paper.

Now they have one type of model that is

“trained on the entire internet and what
falls out the other side does all of that and
better than anything that came before”, he
says.

“That is the magical part of the story.”

This story is free to read so you can share

it with family and friends who don’t yet
have an FT subscription.

Madhumita Murgia is the FT’s artificial intelligence

editor.

Visual storytelling team: Dan Clark, Sam Learner, Irene

de la Torre Arenas, Sam Joiner, Eade Hemingway and
Oliver Hawkins.

With thanks to Slav Petrov, Jakob Uszkoreit, Aidan

 Gomez and Ashish Vaswani.

To generate the 50D word embeddings we used the

GloVe 6B 50D pre-trained model and converted to
Word2Vec format. To generate the 2D representation of
word embeddings we used the BERT large language
model and reduced dimensionality using UMAP. The
self-attention values and the probability scores in the
beam search section are conceptual.

We used the free version of ChatGPT-3.5 to generate

some of the example sentences used in the visual part
of the word embedding and self attention section.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024. All rights reserved.

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