If language models seem a black box to you, join the talk to understand their history and importance. Language models have evolved over the years with key milestones and achievements that played a pivotal role in the field of Natural language processing. Starting from the early statistical, regular expression, and rule-based systems, the talk will progress to the emergence of neural networks based language models. We will go over landmark studies and breakthroughs that propelled the field with recent transformer based architecture along with large scale pretraining and transfer learning that has revolutionized language learning.

The research in the area fostered innovation in the open source world with adoption of projects such as PyTorch, Hugging Face, and LangChain. The frameworks democratized access to the technology and are further accelerating research and development. We will discuss key projects and ecosystems for developing and deploying applications with these technologies. Attendees will gain insights derived from real-life examples to enhance development with large language models.