Large Language Model (LLM)

Definition: An AI model trained on an enormous amount of text, built to predict the most likely next word given everything written so far — that single mechanism, repeated, is what produces writing, code, and conversation that reads as fluent and often accurate.

Why it matters: Almost every AI writing, coding, and chat tool in daily use is an LLM under the hood — including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Understanding that it predicts rather than "knows" explains both why it's so useful for well-represented topics and why it confidently gets obscure or specific facts wrong.

Example: ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are all large language models — different companies, different training data, but the same underlying next-word-prediction mechanism.