The Systems Behind AI: Understanding LLMs and Their Place in Engineering

You’ve used AI. You’ve explored it. You’ve probably even built with it. But behind many of the AI systems we interact with today is something more fundamental. The Large Language Model (LLM). LLMs power a large portion of modern AI systems and AI agents. They act as the core intelligence layer behind many tools and applications. So before building more systems with AI, an important question becomes: What exactly are LLMs? What Are LLMs A Large Language Model (LLM) is a computational model trained on vast amounts of data and designed for natural language processing, especially language understanding and language generation. These models learn patterns in language and use those patterns to generate responses, reason through prompts, and assist in solving problems. At a high level, LLM systems typically involve: Encoders: which process and understand input information Decoders : which generate responses or outputs Modern LLMs combine these mechanisms to process context, relationships betw