What is a large language model?

A large language model (LLM) is an AI model trained on huge amounts of text to understand and write language, which powers chatbots and many AI tools.

It predicts text, which turns out to be enough to answer questions, summarize, translate, write code and hold a conversation. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are apps built on LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

LLMs can sound confident and still be wrong, so tools that cite sources or work from your own documents are easier to trust.