The Next Token – LLMs, from the Beginning

Yes, the article uses AI-assisted text, so if that offends you, no need to accuse: you can just stop reading.

I have a good amount of background knowledge on all of this, and I've invested hours into pulling this short series together, so this was not just some single shot prompt and hope for the best.

As someone who has used LLMs since ChatGPT first launched, and used them locally since the first open models were released around the Llama 2 era, I have a perspective to share that I think offers some value. LLMs aren't magic. People who have only ever used full reasoning models with agentic tool calling loops may not appreciate how they work under the hood, so this article series tries to give you the foundational concepts and terminology to do more research. Hopefully, it also gives a basic understanding.

Part of the difficulty of putting something like this together is that I don’t know what people don’t know, so there will invariably be gaps that make some of this hard to understand.

I am sure there are ways this series can be improved, so any constructive feedback is welcome.