You could be forgiven for thinking that LLMs and

generative AI are focused on chats tasks.

After all, chatbots are highly
visible and getting a lot of attention.
Next word prediction is
the base concept behind
a number of different capabilities,
starting with a basic chatbot.
However, you can use this conceptually simple technique
for a variety of other tasks within text generation.
For example, you can ask a model
to write an essay based on a prompt,
to summarize conversations where you
provide the dialogue as part of your prompt and
the model uses this data along with
its understanding of natural language
to generate a summary.
You can use models for a variety of translation tasks
from traditional translation
between two different languages,
such as French and German,
or English and Spanish.
Or to translate natural language to machine code.
For example, you could ask a model to write
some Python code that will return the mean of
every column in a DataFrame and the model will
generate code that you can pass to an interpreter.
You can use LLMs to carry out smaller,
focused tasks like information retrieval.
In this example, you ask the model to identify all of
the people and places identified in a news article.
This is known as
named entity recognition, a word classification.
The understanding of knowledge
encoded in the model's parameters allows it
to correctly carry out this task
and return the requested information to you.
Finally, an area of
active development is augmenting LLMs by
connecting them to external data sources
or using them to invoke external APIs.
You can use this ability to
provide the model with information it doesn't
know from its pre-training and to enable
your model to power interactions with the real-world.
You'll learn much more about how to do
this in week 3 of the course.
Developers have discovered that as
the scale of foundation models
grows from hundreds of millions
of parameters to billions,
even hundreds of billions,
the subjective understanding of language
that a model possesses also increases.
This language
understanding stored within the parameters of
the model is what processes, reasons,
and ultimately solves the tasks you give it,
but it's also true that smaller models can be fine
tuned to perform well on specific focused tasks.
You'll learn more about how to do
this in week 2 of the course.
The rapid increase in
capability that LLMs have exhibited in
the past few years is largely
due to the architecture that powers them.
Let's move on to the next video to take a closer look.