## Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, and Large Language Models

Since programs such as ChatGPT have become widely available, terms such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Generative AI (GenAI), and Large Language Model (LLM) have quickly entered the vocabulary of our daily lives. On this page, we define these three terms together, as they all relate to each other: they represent different levels of the same concept, with Artificial Intelligence being the broadest in scope, and Large Language Model being the narrowest.

‘The differences between 'regular' AI, GenAI, and LLMs’, Microsoft Designer.

You can click on the tabs of the accordion below to get the relevant definitions of these three terms.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence actually has two, connected definitions. However, one is less important for this module, namely that it is a (sub)field of computer science. The other definition is what this field of computer science actually studies, namely computer technologies centered around the goal of having computers perform human tasks. This includes tasks such as (image) classification, language generation, or complex decision making. Artificial intelligence as a field started as early as the 1950s, and since then many AI technologies have been created. Many of us have been using AI technologies in our daily life through things such as route planners, song and video suggestions on our social media apps, and spelling control in our word processors.

Generative AI (GenAI)

Generative AI is the term used for a subset of AI technologies that aim to create new things that previously did not exist, such as text, music, images, or video. In other words, these technologies have a generative function. With this distinct goal it differentiates itself from predictive AI, which focuses on predicting future events on the basis of current data (i.e., weather predictions), and from descriptive AI, which focuses on identifying patterns and summarizing information in data (i.e., automated suggestion for key words). Generative AI has seen a large increase in popularity in recent years due to breakthroughs in how AI models are trained and function. One of the popular examples of Generative AI is ChatGPT.

Large Language Model (LLM)

Large Language Models (LLM) are a type of Generative AI technologies that are trained on enormous amounts of language data for the equivalent of hundreds of human years (possible because of the parallel processing of data), and as a result are able to generate human-like text. As generative models, LLMs produce texts that are new, rather than remixing existing texts through copying and pasting.