LLMs: Their Past, Promise, and Problems

Transformer-based large language models are currently at the forefront of modern artificial intelligence. Their prominence followed from the seminal paper Attention is All You Need 1. Vaswani and his colleagues suggested placing attention mechanisms within the encoder and decoder modules of autoencoders rather than using them to focus between these two modules. In this paper we present first the seminal insights of early AI that lead to deep learning. We then describe the mathematical tools necessary for understanding the current generation of LLMs and follow this with a brief description of the transformer architecture. We then provide examples of LLMs in action and conclude with some observations of their promise and problems.