Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad category of software that can recognize patterns, learn from data, and produce useful outputs.

AI is a category—not one single tool. Within that category are models: trained systems that learn from data and then apply what they’ve learned to new situations. Some models specialize in speech, vision, or forecasting.

You’re likely starting your AI journey by using conversational AI tools, like ChatGPT. The models behind ChatGPT specialize in language—these are called large language models.

A large language model (LLM) is a model designed to work with language. It learns patterns from large amounts of text from many sources so it can generate and transform text in helpful ways. An LLM doesn’t “know” things the way a person does. Instead, it predicts the most likely next piece of language based on context. Over time, advances in computing power, training methods, and access to large datasets made it possible to build larger and more capable large language models.