Author: Mark Stevenson, Senior Lecturer, University of Sheffield

The arrival of AI systems called large language models (LLMs), like OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, has been heralded as the start of a new technological era. And they may indeed have significant impacts on how we live and work in future. But they haven’t appeared from nowhere and have a much longer history than most people realise. In fact, most of us have already been using the approaches they are based on for years in our existing technology. LLMs are a particular type of language model, which is a mathematical representation of language based on probabilities. If you’ve ever used predictive…