How's it going?

I'm Megha.
Today I'm going to be talking about
Large Language Models.
Don't know what those are?
Me either...
Just kidding!
I actually know
what I'm talking about.
I'm a Customer Engineer here
at Google Cloud
and today I'm going to teach
you everything
you need to know about LLMs -
that's short for
Large Language Models.
In this course,
you're going to learn to define
Large Language Models, describe
LLM use cases, explain
prompt tuning, and describe Google's
generative AI development tools.
Let's get into it...
Large Language Models, or LLMs,
are a subset of deep learning.
To find out
more about deep learning,
check out our Introduction
to Generative AI course video.
LLMs and generative AI intersect,
and they are both a part of deep learning.
Another area of AI you may be hearing
a lot about is generative AI.
This is a type of artificial
intelligence that can produce
new content - including text, images,
audio, and synthetic data.
Alright,
back to LLMs...
So, what are Large Language Models?
Large Language Models refer to large,
general-purpose language models
that can be pre-trained and then
fine-tuned for specific purposes.
What do pre-trained and
fine-tuned mean?
Great questions.
Let's dive in.
Imagine training a dog.
Often you train your dog
basic commands such as
sit, come, down, and stay.
These commands
are normally sufficient
for everyday life and help your dog
become a good canine citizen.
Good boy!
But, if you need a special-service dog,
such as a police dog,
a guide dog, or a hunting dog,
you add special trainings, right?
This similar idea
applies to Large Language Models.
These models are trained
for general purposes to solve common
language problems such as text
classification, question answering,
document summarization, and text
generation across industries.
The models can then be tailored
to solve specific problems
in different fields such as retail,
finance, and entertainment,
using a relatively small
size of field datasets.
So, now that you've got that down,
let's further
break down the concept into three
major features of
Large Language Models.
We'll start with the word ‘large’.
Large indicates two meanings.
First, is the enormous size
of the training dataset,
sometimes at the petabyte scale.
Second,
it refers to the parameter count.
In machine learning, parameters
are often called hyperparameters.
Parameters
are basically the memories
and the knowledge that
the machine learned from the model training.
Parameters define the skill of a
model in solving a problem,
such as predicting text.
So that's why we use the word ‘large’.
What about general purpose?
General purpose is
when the models are sufficient
to solve common problems.
Two reasons led to this idea.
First is the commonality
of human language
regardless of the specific tasks,
and second is the resource
restriction.
Only certain organizations
have the capability to train
such Large Language Models
with huge datasets
and a tremendous
number of parameters.
How about letting them create
fundamental language models
for others to use?
So this leaves us
with our last terms:
pre-trained and fine-tuned,
which mean to pre-train
a Large Language Model
for a general purpose
with a large dataset,
and then fine-tune it for specific
aims with a much smaller dataset.
So now that we've nailed down
the definition of what
Large Language Models (LLMs) are,
we can move on to describing
LLM use cases.
The benefits of using Large Language
Models are straightforward.
First, a single model can be used
for different tasks.
This is a dream come true.
These Large Language Models,
that are trained
with petabytes of data and generate
billions of parameters, are smart
enough to solve different tasks,
including language
translation, sentence completion,
text classification, question
answering, and more.
Second, Large Language Models
require minimal field training data
when you tailor them
to solve your specific problem.
Large Language Models
obtain decent performance
even with little domain
training data.
In other words,
they can be used for few-shot
or even zero-shot scenarios.
In machine learning,
‘few-shots’ refers to training a model
with minimal data
and ‘zero shot’ implies
that a model can recognize things
that have not explicitly been taught
in the training before.
Third, the performance of
Large Language Models
is continuously growing when
you add more data and parameters.
Large Language Models
are almost exclusively
based on transformer models.
Let me explain what that means.
A transformer model
consists of an encoder and a decoder.
The encoder encodes
the input sequence
and passes it to the decoder,
which learns how to decode the
representations for a relevant task.
We've come a long way
from traditional programing,
to neural networks,
to generative models.
In traditional programing,
we used to have to hard code
the rules for distinguishing a cat.
Type: animal. Legs: four. Ears: two.
Fur: yes. Likes: yarn and catnip.
In the wave of neural networks,
we could give the network pictures
of cats and dogs and ask,
‘Is this a cat?’
And it would predict a cat.
What's really cool is that ,
in the generative wave,
we, as users,
can generate our own content -
whether it be text, images,
audio, video, or more.
For example, models like Gemini,
Google's multimodal AI model,
or LaMDA, Language Model
for Dialog Applications, ingest very,
very large data
from multiple sources
across the internet
and build foundation language models
we can use simply by asking
a question,
whether typing it into a prompt
or verbally
talking into the prompt itself.
So, when you ask it ‘what's a cat?’
it can give you everything
it has learned about a cat.
Let's compare LLM development
using pre-trained models
with traditional ML development.
First, with LLM development,
you don't need to be an expert.
You don't need training examples, and
there is no need to train a model.
All you need to do
is think about prompt design,
which is a process
of creating a prompt that is clear,
concise, and informative.
It is an important part
of Natural Language Processing,
or NLP for short.
In traditional machine learning,
you need expertise,
training examples,
compute time, and hardware.
That's a LOT more requirements
than LLM development.
Let's take a look at an example
of a text generation use case
to really drive the point home.
Question answering, or QA,
is a subfield of Natural Language
Processing that deals with the task
of automatically answering questions
posed in natural language.
QA systems are typically trained
on a large amount of text and code,
and they are able to answer
a wide range of questions,
including factual, definitional,
and opinion-based questions.
The key here
is that you needed domain knowledge
to develop these Question
Answering models.
Let's make this clear
with a real-world example.
Domain knowledge is required
to develop a question
answering model for customer IT support,
or healthcare or supply chain.
But, using generative QA,
the model generates free text
directly based on the context.
There is
no need for domain knowledge!
Let me show you a few more examples
of how cool this is.
Let's look at three questions
given to Gemini, a Large Language Model
chat bot developed by Google AI.
Question 1. This year’s sales are $100,000.
Expenses are $60,000.
How much is net profit?
Gemini first shares
how net profit is calculated,
then performs the calculation.
Then, Gemini provides
a definition of net profit.
Here's another question.
Inventory on hand is 6,000 units.
A new order requires 8,000 units.
How many units do I need to fill
to complete the order?
Again, Gemini answers the question
by performing the calculation.
And our last example, we have 1,000
sensors in ten geographic regions.
How many sensors do
we have on average in each region?
Gemini answers the question
with an example on
how to solve the problem,
and some additional context.
So how is that
in each of our questions,
a desired response was obtained?
This is due to prompt design.
Fancy!
Prompt design and prompt engineering
are two closely related concepts in
Natural Language Processing.
Both involve the process
of creating a prompt that is clear,
concise, and informative.
But, there are some key differences
between the two.
Prompt design
is the process of creating a prompt
that is tailored
to the specific task
that the system is being asked
to perform.
For example,
if the system is being asked
to translate a text
from English to French,
the prompt should be written
in English and should specify that
the translation should be in French.
Prompt engineering is the process
of creating a prompt
that is designed
to improve performance.
This may involve
using domain-specific knowledge,
providing examples
of desired output, or using keywords
that are known to be effective
for the specific system.
In general, prompt design
is a more general concept,
while prompt engineering
is a more specialized concept.
Prompt design is essential,
while prompt engineering
is only necessary
for systems that require a high
degree of accuracy or performance.
There are three kinds of Large
Language Models: generic language models,
instruction-tuned, and dialog-tuned.
Each needs prompting
in a different way.
Let's start with generic language
models.
Generic language models predict
the next word based on the language
in the training data.
Here is a generic language model.
In this example, the cat sat on...
The next word should be ‘the’
and you can see that ‘the’
is most likely the next word.
Think of this model type
as an ‘auto-complete’ in search.
Next, we have instruction-tuned models.
This type of model is trained
to predict
a response to the instructions
given in the input.
For example, summarize the text of x,
generate a poem in the style of x,
give me a list of keywords
based on semantic similarity for x.
In this example, classify text into
neutral, negative or positive.
And finally, we have dialog-tuned models.
This model is trained to have
a dialog by the next response.
Dialog-tuned models
are a special case of instruction
tuned where requests are typically
framed as questions to a chat bot.
Dialog-tuning
is expected to be in the context
of a longer back-and-forth
conversation, and typically
works better with natural,
question-like phrasings.
Chain-of-thought reasoning is the
observation that models are better
at getting the right answer
when they first output
text that explains the reason
for the answer.
Let's look at the question.
Roger has five tennis balls.
He buys two more cans of tennis
balls.
Each can has three tennis balls.
How many tennis balls does
he have now?
This question is posed
initially with no response.
The model is less likely
to get the correct answer directly.
However, by the time
the second question is asked,
the output is more likely to end
with the correct answer.
But there is a catch...
There's always a catch.
A model that can do everything
has practical limitations.
But, task-specific
tuning can make LLMs more reliable.
Vertex AI provides task-specific
foundation models.
Let's get into how you can tune
with some real-world examples.
Let's say you have a use case
where you need to gather
how your customers are feeling
about your product or service.
You can use a sentiment
analysis task model.
Same for vision tasks. If you need to
perform occupancy analytics,
there is a task-specific model
for your use case.
Tuning a model enables you
to customize the model response
based on examples of the task
that you want the model to perform.
It is essentially the process
of adapting a model to a new domain
or a set of custom use cases,
by training the model on new data.
For example, we may collect training
data and ‘tune’
the model specifically
for the legal or medical domains.
You can also further
tune the model by ‘fine-tuning’,
where you bring your own dataset
and retrain the model
by tuning every weight in the LMM.
This requires a big training job and
hosting your own fine-tuned model.
Here is an example of a medical foundation
model trained on healthcare data.
The tasks include question
answering, image analysis,
finding similar patients, etc.
Fine-tuning is expensive
and not realistic in many cases,
so are there more efficient
methods of tuning? Yes.
Parameter-efficient tuning methods
(PETM) are methods
for tuning a Large Language Model
on your own custom data
without duplicating the model.
The base model itself
is not altered.
Instead, a small number of add-on
layers are tuned,
which can be swapped
in and out at inference time.
I'm going to tell you about three
other ways Google Cloud
can help you get more out of your LLMs.
The first is Vertex AI Studio.
Vertex AI Studio lets you quickly
explore and customize generative
AI models that you can leverage in
your applications on Google Cloud.
Vertex AI Studio helps developers
create and deploy generative AI models
by providing a variety of tools
and resources that make it easy to get started.
For example, there is a library
of pre-trained models,
a tool for fine-tuning models,
a tool for deploying models to production,
and a community forum for developers
to share ideas and collaborate.
Next, we have Vertex AI,
which is particularly helpful
for those of you
who don't have much
coding experience.
You can build generative
AI search and conversations
for customers and employees
with Vertex AI Agent Builder,
formerly Vertex AI Search and Conversation.
Build with little or no coding
and no prior
machine learning experience.
Vertex AI can
help you create your own:
chat bots, digital assistants, custom search
engines, knowledge bases,
training applications, and more.
Gemini is a multimodal AI model.
Unlike traditional language models,
it’s not limited
to understanding text alone.
It can analyze images,
understand the nuances of audio,
and even interpret programming code.
This allows Gemini to perform
complex tasks
that were previously impossible for AI.
Due to its advanced architecture,
Gemini is incredibly adaptable
and scalable,
making it suitable for diverse
applications.
Model Garden is continuously updated
to include new models.
See? I told you way back in the beginning
of this video
that I knew what I was talking about
when it came to
Large Language Models,
and now you do too.
Thank you for watching our course,
and make sure
to check out our other videos
if you want to learn more
about how you can use AI.