What’s an LLM, Really?
We covered this quick in our Glossary, but it deserves its own deeper look, because it’s the one term everything else in AI gets built on top of.
LLM stands for Large Language Model. Strip away the fancy name, and here’s what it actually is: a program that’s read an almost unbelievable amount of writing — books, articles, conversations, websites — and learned the patterns of how words and ideas fit together. When you ask it a question, it’s not looking up the answer somewhere. It’s predicting, piece by piece, what a good answer would look like, based on everything it’s read.
Think about the smartest, most well-read person you know. Now imagine they’ve read basically everything ever written, but they can only talk about what they’ve already seen — they can’t go look something up mid-conversation unless you give them a tool to do that. That’s close to what an LLM is.
Why this matters to you: when your business uses an LLM-powered tool, it’s not thinking the way you do. It’s really good at sounding like it understands you, because it’s seen millions of conversations like the one you’re having. That’s exactly why training it on YOUR business — your menu, your story, your prices — matters so much. Without that, it’s guessing based on everything else it’s seen, not on you specifically.
