Artificial intelligence is making spectacular progress, and one of the best examples is the development of large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT series. In these lectures, written for readers with a background in mathematics or physics, we give a brief history and survey of the state of the art, and describe the underlying transformer architecture in detail. We then explore some current ideas on how LLMs work and how models trained to predict the next word in a text are able to perform other tasks displaying intelligence.

翻译：人工智能正取得令人瞩目的进展，其中最好的例子之一便是大型语言模型（LLMs）的发展，例如OpenAI的GPT系列。在这些面向具备数学或物理学背景的读者的讲义中，我们简要回顾了历史并概述了当前技术，同时详细描述了底层的Transformer架构。随后，我们探讨了关于LLMs如何运作的一些现有观点，以及那些训练用于预测文本中下一个单词的模型如何能够执行其他展现智能的任务。