How LLMs work, their potential and limitations

Catalog description

Large language models (LLMs) are ubiquitous. This course is about how they work, understood in both a technical and holistic sense: what's going on inside these models, and how do they interact with the rest of the world? More specifically, this course will cover: 1. What a (large) language model actually is and how it compares to other types of ML models. 2. The current LLM ecosystem. 3. Prompting, "thinking", in-context learning, finetuning. 4. How LLMs are evaluated. 5. How to interpret what LLMs are doing.