Building LLMs for Production

A Brief History of Language Models

The evolution of natural language processing (NLP) models is a story of constant invention and improvement. This is a journey through the rise of language processing (and understanding) models, from early statistical models to the birth of the first large language models (LLMs). This timeline presents a progression of model building rather than an in-depth technical study, so don’t worry if certain model specifics appear complicated. We will dive into the key concepts in depth in further sections.

One of the earliest works in language modeling, the Bag of Words model, began in 1954 and involved a simple approach for document classification based on counting word occurrences. It primarily tallied word occurrences ...