Large Language Model
Etymology
Descriptive rather than coined: "large" for the enormous number of internal parameters and the sheer volume of text used to train it, "language model" for a long-standing term meaning a system that estimates how likely a sequence of words is. The class leapt into public view with the release of conversational systems around 2022, though the underlying method is statistical prediction at massive scale.
noun phrase · /LARJ LANG-gwij MOD-ul/
An AI system trained on vast amounts of text to predict and generate fluent language.
What it names
The technology behind modern chatbots — clarifying what they actually do: predict likely words, not consult a store of facts.
Example
She drafted the email with a large language model, then corrected the two details it got wrong.
Related idea
Understanding an LLM as a predictor of plausible text explains its hallucination problem: it generates what sounds right, not what it has verified, so fluency is no guarantee of accuracy.