LLMs vs Transformers

Generative AI technologies often prompt the question of differentiating between transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs), with transformers referring to a specific architecture pattern and LLMs to a type of AI model. Some LLMs, like those used in ChatGPT, utilize transformer architecture, leading to confusion between the two. LLMs are designed to understand and generate human language, trained on extensive datasets to predict the next word in a sequence, enabling applications in text generation, summarization, translation, and coding assistance. They are becoming transformative with tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard. Conversely, transformers are versatile, supporting a broad array of tasks beyond language generation, such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and language translation. A prominent example is BERT, which enhances search query context understanding and search engine results. Both transformers and LLMs are pivotal in advancing AI capabilities in various applications.