Hands-On Large Language Models: Language Understanding and Generation

Jay Alammar

AI has acquired startling new language capabilities in just the past few years. Driven by the rapid advances in deep learning, language AI systems are able to write and understand text better than ever before. This trend enables the rise of new features, products, and entire industries. With this book, Python developers will learn the practical tools and concepts they need to use these capabilities today.

You’ll learn how to use the power of pre-trained large language models for use cases like copywriting and summarization; create semantic search systems that go beyond keyword matching; build systems that classify and cluster text to enable scalable understanding of large amounts of text documents; and use existing libraries and pre-trained models for text classification, search, and clusterings.

This book also shows you how to:

• Build advanced LLM pipelines to cluster text documents and explore the topics they belong to
• Build semantic search engines that go beyond keyword search, using methods like dense retrieval and rerankers
• Explore how generative models can be used, from prompt engineering all the way to retrieval-augmented generation
• Gain a deeper understanding of how to train LLMs and optimize them for specific applications using generative model fine-tuning, contrastive fine-tuning, and in-context learning