Quick Essay: Large Language Models, How to Train Them, and xAI’s Grok

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, it took the world by storm, reaching over a million users in only 5 days. This kind of viral attention was previously unheard of in AI, driven by how closely the underlying language model seemed to replicate human intelligence. Since then, there has been an explosion in AI activity, ranging from applications built on top of ChatGPT which seek to improve efficiency for mundane tasks, to new chatbots like xAI’s Grok which aim to replace ChatGPT altogether. This explosion happened so quickly that few of us really took a step back to understand the basics. So we wanted to sit down and understand how LLMs work to figure out how new entrants like xAI will compete. Upgrade to paid So what is an LLM? A large language model is a type of neural network that can ingest strings of text and then predict the next sequence of words. Intelligent chatbots like ChatGPT are specialized versions of these language models that have been trained for the specific

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, it took the world by storm, reaching over a million users in only 5 days. This kind of viral attention was previously unheard of in AI, driven by how closely the underlying language model seemed to replicate human intelligence. Since then, there has been an explosion in AI activity, ranging from applications built on top of ChatGPT which seek to improve efficiency for mundane tasks, to new chatbots like xAI’s Grok which aim to replace ChatGPT altogether. This explosion happened so quickly that few of us really took a step back to understand the ba