Large Language Model (LLM)
1 min read · Reviewed 17 Oct 2026
In short
The kind of AI that powers ChatGPT and Claude.
In plain English
A large language model is a system trained on an enormous amount of writing until it got very good at one narrow skill: predicting what text comes next. Everything else — answering questions, summarising, translating, drafting — falls out of doing that prediction well.
A real example
ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are all large language models with different training and different personalities. Same underlying idea; different results from the same prompt.
Why it matters
Once you know it is predicting rather than looking up, the behaviour makes sense: why it writes fluently, why it sometimes invents, and why giving it good context in your prompt changes the answer so much.
