Plain English
LLM
Large language model: an AI trained on huge amounts of text to read and write language.
An AI model trained on a vast amount of text to predict what comes next. At huge scale, that one skill lets it write, summarize, translate and answer questions; it’s the engine inside chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
Why it matters
Knowing that it predicts likely text explains both its strength (fluent drafts) and its weakness (confident mistakes). Treat it as a writer to check, not a database to trust.
At work
When you ask an assistant to turn meeting notes into a follow-up email, an LLM is writing it.
Think of it like your phone’s autocomplete, grown enormously: it has read so much that its next-word guesses add up to whole letters, reports and answers.
Related terms
Where it appears