Earlier this year, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View asked if I could help put together a short visual explainer for how large language models work. At that time, I was planning to cover LLMs and transformers on 3blue1brown anyway, and I love the museum, so this was an easy yes.
The target audience is a bit different from the usual 3b1b project, in that we want to assume no technical background and minimal familiarity with machine learning.
At first, I thought this would simply be an abridged version of the more detailed explainers I was already making, but ultimately it proved to be a satisfying outlet for emphasizing the most important ideas that those more technical explainers may have glossed over.
The museum is just kicking off its LLM exhibit now, and I plan to post this to the channel this weekend. In the meantime, enjoy the early view!