LLMs simply and faithfully explained

This article provides a clear and accessible explanation of Large Language Models (LLMs) without advanced mathematics. It introduces the core idea behind modern LLMs: next-word prediction based on probability distributions learned from large text corpora. Using Yoshua Bengio’s neural probabilistic language model as a conceptual starting point, the article explains how neural networks produce vectors of logits rather than direct word predictions, and how softmax and argmax convert these into output words. It also describes recursion, context windows, and the breakthrough of Transformers in extending long-range dependencies. The aim is to offer a faithful and simple conceptual understanding of LLMs as high-dimensional, fuzzy repositories of human linguistic knowledge.