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History and Development of LLMs

It explains in detail the various language models developed in the process, starting from the beginnings of natural language processing technology to the latest LLM models.

20 learners are taking this course

Level Beginner

Course period Unlimited

NLP
NLP
RNN
RNN
self-attention
self-attention
transformer
transformer
LLM
LLM
NLP
NLP
RNN
RNN
self-attention
self-attention
transformer
transformer
LLM
LLM

What you will gain after the course

  • The development process of language models and the principles of each language model

  • Origins of NLP

  • The structure and principles of Transformers

  • Structure and principles of RNN and LSTM

  • Principles of the Attention Mechanism

History and Evolution of LLMs: From the Origins of Language Models to the Latest Technologies

🧭 Precautions

The course is currently being completed. The downside is that you may have to wait a long time until the lectures are fully finished (though they will be supplemented frequently). Please take this into consideration when making your purchase decision.

📋 Change Log

  • December 10, 2025


    • I have released the table of contents for now, as I plan to add a significant number of new lessons. These have been marked as [2nd Edition].

    • I have marked the existing lessons as [1st Edition]. I plan to revise the existing lessons. Once they are updated with the revised content, the lesson titles will be marked as [2nd Edition].

🔍 Course Overview

This course is a comprehensive learning journey through the evolution of language models, from early natural language processing research to the latest Large Language Models (LLMs). You will systematically understand the technological shifts starting from the rule-based era, through statistical language models, neural network-based models, and the Transformer revolution, leading up to today's multimodal, efficiency-focused, and application-oriented LLMs.

🔍 Learning Objectives

  • Understand the overall flow of how language models have evolved.

  • Identify the characteristics of key models from each era (RNN, LSTM, Transformer, BERT, GPT, etc.).

  • Structurally organize the latest LLM technologies and research trends.

  • Understand LLM efficiency techniques and their practical application methods.

  • Critically examine the future directions and limitations of LLM research.

🔍 Learning Structure

The lecture consists of a total of 6 sections, with each section organized around chronological trends and research axes.

  • Section 1: Origins and Early Development of NLP

  • Section 2: Language Model Research Before Transformers

  • Section 3: The Transformer Revolution and Large Language Models

  • Section 4: Latest LLM Technologies and Research Trends

  • Section 5: LLM Efficiency Techniques and Model Optimization

  • Section 6: LLM Applications, System Integration, and Future Outlook

📘Section 1. Origins and Early Development of Language Models

In this section, you will learn about the starting point of NLP and the foundations of early language models.

Key Learning Topics
  • What problems NLP addresses and how it began

  • How rule-based systems were structured and why they encountered limitations

  • How statistical language models (n-gram LM) emerged

  • The emergence and significance of early large-scale corpora, such as the Brown Corpus and Penn Treebank

  • The concept of the Distributional Hypothesis and its application in NLP

  • The birth and contributions of early word embedding technologies such as Word2Vec and GloVe

📘Section 2. Development of Language Models Before Transformers

This section covers how RNN-based models transformed NLP and the technical limitations prior to Transformers.

Key Learning Objectives
  • The background of the emergence and structural principles of RNN, LSTM, and GRU

  • The essence of the long-term dependency problem

  • How the Seq2Seq architecture led the innovation in machine translation

  • The reason for the emergence of the Attention mechanism and its effects

  • CNN-based language models belong to a different research category, so it is uncertain, but the main ideas will be learned.

  • Understand the need for next-generation models by summarizing the research landscape immediately preceding the Transformer.

📘Section 3. The Transformer Revolution and the Era of Large Language Models

In this section, you will learn how the modern LLM era, centered around Transformers, began.

Key Learning Content
  • The structure and characteristics of the Transformer, represented by “Attention Is All You Need”

  • Background on the emergence of Pretraining and Language Understanding models

  • The concept of bidirectionality in the BERT model and the MLM (Masked LM) technique

  • The main evolutionary trends of the GPT series (GPT-1 to GPT-4)

  • Establishment of the standardized learning paradigm of “Pre-training → Fine-tuning”

  • The meaning of Scaling Laws and changes in LLM training strategies

📘Section 4. Latest LLM Models and Technological Advancements

This section covers not only the architecture, characteristics, and training methods of the latest LLMs, but also human feedback-based models.

Key Learning Content
  • Common characteristics of the latest LLMs, such as GPT-4, Llama, and Claude

  • The background behind the emergence of open-source LLMs (e.g., Llama, Mistral)

  • User-customized learning technologies such as RLHF, DPO, and Instruction Tuning

  • Structure and use cases of multimodal models

  • Research on bias, hallucinations, and safety, along with ethical considerations

📘Section 5. LLM Efficiency Technologies and Model Optimization

This section focuses on technologies that make large-scale models lighter and faster.

Key Learning Content
  • Quantization, Pruning, Knowledge Distillation

  • PEFT (Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning) such as LoRA and Prefix Tuning

  • High-speed Attention algorithms such as FlashAttention

  • Inference cost reduction techniques

  • Concepts and technical challenges of on-device LLM

  • Efficiency optimization cases in actual service application

📘Section 6. LLM Application, System Integration, and Future Outlook

In this section, you will learn how LLMs are utilized in actual systems and services,
and we will conclude by summarizing future directions while acknowledging some uncertainties.

Key Learning Content
  • Structure and advantages of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

  • Principles of tool-use based LLMs such as Toolformer and ReAct

  • Domain-specific LLMs for fields such as medicine, law, and coding

  • Expansion of multimodal models such as GPT-4V

  • Research on LLM-based autonomous systems (some parts "uncertain")

  • Future prospects and points of debate regarding LLMs (e.g., the possibility of AGI → “uncertain”)

🔍 Example Screen

As shown in the example screen below, various diagrams are used during the lecture to explain LLM-related concepts in detail. In particular, intensive explanations are provided using diagrams related to NLP, RNN, self-attention, transformers, and LLMs.

Screen example 1 explained in Lesson 3

Screen example 2 explained in Lesson 3

Lecture Title

Screen example 3 explained in Lesson 3

🔍Notes before taking the course

Target Audience

  • Learners interested in AI and data science

  • Developers and researchers who want to systematically understand NLP or LLM technology

  • Those who want to grasp the latest trends in AI technology


Prerequisites

  • Basic machine learning concepts

  • Experience using simple Python-based models (Recommended)

Expected Benefits

  • You can gain a deep understanding of the overall history of language model development.

  • You can acquire the foundational knowledge to analyze and utilize the latest LLM technologies and trends.

  • You can design problem-solving strategies, service architectures, and research directions using LLMs.

Hands-on Environment

  • Since this is a theory-oriented lecture, a separate practice environment is not required.

Learning Materials

  • The lecture notes are attached as a PDF file.

History and Evolution of LLMs: From the Origins of Language Models to the Latest Technologies

Recommended for
these people

Who is this course right for?

  • Those who want to know the origins, development process, and technical trends of LLMs

  • Those who want to know the artificial neural network structure that serves as the foundation of LLMs

  • Those who want to build theoretical knowledge for developing LLMs themselves

Hello
This is arigaram

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I am someone for whom IT is both a hobby and a profession.

I have a diverse background in writing, translation, consulting, development, and lecturing.

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72 lectures ∙ (10hr 39min)

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