Introduction

No one on Earth fully understands the inner workings of LLMs. Researchers are working to gain a better understanding, but this is a slow process that will take years—perhaps decades—to complete.

Still, there’s a lot that experts do understand about how these systems work. The goal of this article is to make a lot of this knowledge accessible to a broad audience. Timothy B Lee and Sean Trott aim to explain what’s known about the inner workings of these models without resorting to technical jargon or advanced math.