LLM Strategy & Product Design In Plain English

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses strategies and product design considerations for large language models (LLMs) for executives, investors, and entrepreneurs. It covers the current state of LLMs, how they work, and guidance on designing an LLM-based product.

🙋 Q&A

[01] LLM Strategy & Product Design

1. What are the key considerations regarding the future direction of LLMs?

• The article discusses two potential paths for LLMs - becoming a few broad general-purpose applications vs. having smaller models finely tuned for specific business cases.
• It notes the tradeoffs between larger models with more parameters, data, and compute power vs. smaller, more specialized models.
• The author believes a combination of the two approaches will likely prevail, favoring smaller LLMs for specific use cases.

2. How does the author view generative AI as an "enabling layer" rather than a standalone product?

• The author compares the evolution of generative AI to the evolution of data storage and image manipulation technologies, where the core capabilities become an underlying enabling layer rather than a user-facing product.
• Just as databases and image editing software are now ubiquitous enabling technologies, the author believes generative AI will similarly become an implied part of the value chain in the future.

[02] How LLMs Work

1. What is the key difference between traditional software and LLMs?

• Traditional software is deterministic, with clear "if-then" logic, while LLMs are probabilistic, using statistics to generate results without a defined logical flow.
• This probabilistic nature makes it challenging to fully understand or control the outputs of LLMs, requiring careful consideration of use cases to ensure useful, accurate, and legal results.

2. How does the author explain the inner workings of LLMs using the example of ChatGPT?

• The article provides a detailed technical explanation of how LLMs like ChatGPT work, including the use of tokens, attention maps, and weighted vectors to predict the most likely next word in a sequence.
• It highlights the brute-force mathematical crunching that occurs behind the scenes to generate the final output.

[03] Designing an LLM Product

1. What are the key considerations the fictional CEO of FinWiseMax.ai faces in building an LLM-based product?

• The CEO needs to quickly build a viable product using limited resources, including deciding between open-source models (e.g., LLaMA) or fine-tuning a pre-trained model.
• The CEO also needs to navigate the complexities of fine-tuning, including addressing issues like catastrophic forgetting, and gathering customer feedback to evaluate the model's performance.
• Regulatory and legal concerns are also a challenge, as the CEO discovers when an SEC expert wants to test the product.

2. What are the different types of LLM models the CEO considers using, and how do they differ in their capabilities?

• The article outlines three main types of LLM models: encoder-only, decoder-only, and encoder-decoder models, each with their own strengths in tasks like sentiment analysis, text generation, and question-answering.
• The CEO plans to use a combination of these model types in their application, depending on the specific data and use cases.