Introduction to LLMs

I was kindly invited by the Women in IT group of the German Informatics Society to give an introductory talk on the topic of LLMs at their yearly meeting. I explained the basic principles of what LLMs are and how they are created and briefly explained how RLHF, tool use, and RAG are used to tune LLMs towards more helpful assistants.
More importantly, I explained how factual inaccuracies happen (why they are not actually “hallucinations”) and why training on the whole internet does not equal training on the whole truth.