Everybody is using LLMs these days. Most of us, however, approach this technology as a black box. How can these things possibly work?

In this talk for AI novices, I'll give you an intuitive, high-level understanding of the inner workings of an LLM. I'm going to tell you about:

- the intuition behind deep neural networks;
- how neural networks learn language;
- the concepts behind attention-based architectures and transformers;
- how LLMs become machines for abstraction.

Let's demystify language AI!

I delivered this session at Techorama Netherlands 2023, where it was one of the two highest-rated talks of the conference together with my other session, "Understanding Git". I also delivered it as a Keynote at Rubyday Italy 2024.