Quick notes while reading The AI Pocket Book, Emmanual Maggiori

A good enough book to learn the necessary keywords for future explorations.


  • LLMs are autoregressive. They're designed to produce a single extra piece of content based on previous content

    • autocomplete on cracks!

  • Difference between LLM and LLM wrapper

    • LLMs -> GPT-4, GPT-4o, Sonnet 4

    • LLM wrapper -> ChatGPT, Claude

  • To generate full sentence, LLM wrapper use LLM to generate 1 word, then attached that word to initial prompt, then used the LLM again to generate 1 more word

    • Hello -> LLM -> Cruel

    • Hello Cruel -> LLM -> World

    • Hello Cruel World -> LLM -> <|end of text|>

  • Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG)

    • basically "augmenting" LLM by adding more context like internal documents (external knowledge base)

    • popular approach to create in-house chatbot that's customize to specific needs

  • Concept of token

    • each element in vocab is a token. Don't confuse with "words" eg;

      • common words (fish, dog)

      • common pieces of words (ish)

      • common latin characters (a, b, c)

    • LLM don't read raw text. Instead LLM wrapper will first convert the input prompt to list of integers

  • Embeddings

    • most common ways on on how LLM represent meaning from this token

    • this is why most LLM struggles to correctly analyze the individual letters in a word (how many r in strawberry)

  • Transformer architecture

    • Attention is all you need -> start from this paper (2017)

    • The methodology that powers current LLM. Previously LSTM

  • CNN (Conventional Neural Network) are common architecture to process other type of data like image

  • CNN + Transformers is use to create multimodal AI like Diffusion

  • Hallucinations

    • confidently wrong outputs generated by AI

    • what? unsatisfactory output by AI based on these characteristics; incorrect, overconfidence & happen in unpredicatable ways

    • why? inedequate world models, misaligned objectives

    • can be mitigated by prompt engineering techniques

    • always keep hallucination in mind