Introduction to LLM

This page provides an easy-to-understand guide on LLMs (Large Language Models) from basics to applications for AI enthusiasts.


Total of 34 articles available. | Currently on page 1 of 1.

Chapter 17 — Future Threats and Emerging Defenses

Seventeenth post of the LLM Primer VII walkthrough — and the series finale. Agent risks and the lethal trifecta, multimodal attack surfaces, deepfakes and C2PA provenance, plus a closing map of the whole LLM Primer arc and the Physical AI sister volume.

2026-05-26

Chapter 15 — Building a Secure AI Organization

Fifteenth post of the LLM Primer VII walkthrough. Security culture for AI teams, red teams and internal audits, vendor risk (SOC 2, ISO 42001), and the emerging AI BOM.

2026-05-24

Chapter 14 — Bias, Fairness, and Responsible AI

Fourteenth post of the LLM Primer VII walkthrough. Sources of bias in LLMs, measurement (BBQ, BOLD, StereoSet, HELM), and the safety-utility trade-off honestly named.

2026-05-23

Chapter 13 — Regulatory Landscape

Thirteenth post of the LLM Primer VII walkthrough. The EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689), US EO 14179, Colorado AI Act, NIST AI RMF + GenAI Profile, and ISO/IEC 42001 as the compliance skeleton.

2026-05-22

Chapter 11 — Observability, Logging, and Incident Response

Eleventh post of the LLM Primer VII walkthrough. Structured LLM logging with PII redaction, OpenTelemetry GenAI conventions, and the NIST SP 800-61 IR cycle adapted for probabilistic systems.

2026-05-20

Chapter 10 — Designing Secure LLM Architectures

Tenth post of the LLM Primer VII walkthrough. Isolation boundaries, policy engines (OPA, Cedar), microVM sandboxes, and the "lethal trifecta" of agent + private data + untrusted content.

2026-05-19

Chapter 8 — Adversarial Attacks on Models

Eighth post of the LLM Primer VII walkthrough. Adversarial examples in NLP (HotFlip, TextFooler), model extraction (Tramèr et al., Carlini et al.), and the defensive strategies for API-boundary abuse.

2026-05-17

LLM Primer VII — Series Introduction & Index

Kicking off the chapter-by-chapter walkthrough of Book VII in the LLM Primer series — AI Security. Why in LLM systems code and data are the same string, and the schedule for the seventeen posts that follow, May 10 through May 26. This is the series finale.

2026-05-09

Chapter 13 — Autoscaling and Cold-Start Mitigation

Thirteenth post of the LLM Primer VI walkthrough. Why standard HPA fails for LLM serving, KEDA for TTFT-aware scaling, Knative scale-to-zero, and CRIU / CUDA graph caching for sub-5-second cold starts.

2026-05-05

Chapter 12 — Disaggregated Serving and Kubernetes

Twelfth post of the LLM Primer VI walkthrough. Why aggregating prefill and decode wastes compute, and how LeaderWorkerSet, NVIDIA Grove, and KAI Scheduler split them apart on Kubernetes.

2026-05-04

Chapter 11 — The Platform and Orchestration Layer

Eleventh post of the LLM Primer VI walkthrough. Engine vs platform — Ray Serve, KServe, BentoML, and NVIDIA Triton — and where each fits in a multi-model pipeline.

2026-05-03

Chapter 10 — The LLM Engine Layer

Tenth post of the LLM Primer VI walkthrough. vLLM as the safe default, TensorRT-LLM for peak NVIDIA-only throughput, SGLang for structured and agentic outputs, and TGI/Ollama for the rest.

2026-05-02

Chapter 9 — Speculative Decoding

Ninth post of the LLM Primer VI walkthrough. The draft-verify paradigm — EAGLE, Medusa, MTP, Lookahead, N-gram — and the verification bottleneck that decides real speedup.

2026-05-01

Chapter 8 — Next-Generation KV Cache Management

Eighth post of the LLM Primer VI walkthrough. PagedAttention, KV eviction algorithms (H2O, InfiniGen), and prefix caching for multi-turn conversations and multi-agent RAG.

2026-04-30

Chapter 7 — Advanced Batching Strategies

Seventh post of the LLM Primer VI walkthrough. Static vs dynamic vs continuous (in-flight) batching, iteration-level scheduling, and how a batch's slots actually progress on the GPU.

2026-04-29

Chapter 6 — Pruning and Knowledge Distillation

Sixth post of the LLM Primer VI walkthrough. Structured vs unstructured pruning, 2:4 sparsity on Hopper, and the distillation lineage from soft probabilities to Patient Knowledge Distillation and MiniLLM.

2026-04-28

Chapter 5 — Demystifying Quantization

Fifth post of the LLM Primer VI walkthrough. From BF16 to INT4 to Blackwell FP4 — quantization algorithms (AWQ, GPTQ, GGUF, SmoothQuant), NVIDIA ModelOpt, and when quantization is safe versus lossy.

2026-04-27

Chapter 2 — The KV Cache Challenge

Second post of the LLM Primer VI walkthrough. The KV cache formula, the attention-variant trade-offs (MHA vs GQA vs MQA), and the memory-fragmentation problem PagedAttention solves.

2026-04-24

Chapter 1 — The Mechanics of Token Generation

First post of the LLM Primer VI walkthrough. The autoregressive bottleneck, the prefill/decode split, and why a high-end GPU is 99.7% idle while serving a single user.

2026-04-23

LLM Primer VI — Series Introduction & Index

Kicking off the chapter-by-chapter walkthrough of Book VI in the LLM Primer series — Scaling AI Systems. Why inference is the discipline that decides whether an LLM app survives real users, and the schedule for the sixteen posts that follow, April 23 through May 8.

2026-04-22

Chapter 8 — Optimizing Performance, Serving, and Cost

Eighth and final post of the LLM Primer V walkthrough. Semantic caching, dynamic model routing, and what actually happens inside the inference server — plus a look ahead to Volume VI on scaling.

2026-04-21

Chapter 5 — Evaluating LLM Applications

Fifth post of the LLM Primer V walkthrough. The offline-online eval distinction, LLM-as-judge patterns, the RAG Triad, and trajectory tests for agents.

2026-04-18

Chapter 4 — AI Agents and Tool Calling

Fourth post of the LLM Primer V walkthrough. ReAct loops, tool schemas as contracts, and the three memory layers agents actually need in production.

2026-04-17

Chapter 11 — Continuous Updates and Pipeline Optimization

Eleventh and final post of the LLM Primer III walkthrough. CDC and incremental indexing keep the corpus fresh, semantic caching and model tiering keep latency down, and a four-stage feedback loop closes the gap between what production tells the team and what the team actually changes — plus a bridge to Volume IV on Model Context Protocol.

2026-03-28

Chapter 10 — Leading Evaluation Frameworks

Tenth post of the LLM Primer III walkthrough. A field guide to the frameworks that turn the Evaluation Triad into something a team can actually run — RAGAS, TruLens, DeepEval on one side, Braintrust, LangSmith, Phoenix, Galileo, Opik on the other, and the Evaluation Gap none of them has yet closed.

2026-03-27

Chapter 7 — Implementing Access Control

Seventh post of the LLM Primer III walkthrough. Document-level ACLs as the foundation, RBAC with Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels, ReBAC with Zanzibar and SpiceDB, and the pre-filter versus post-filter discipline that runs underneath all of them.

2026-03-24

LLM Primer III — Series Introduction & Index

Kicking off the chapter-by-chapter walkthrough of Book III in the LLM Primer series — Enhancing Enterprise AI with RAG. Why retrieval-augmented generation looks simple from the outside and is a stack of disciplines underneath, who this book is for, and the schedule for the eleven posts that follow, March 18 through March 28.

2026-03-17

Chapter 14 — Practical Knowledge for Engineers

Twelfth post — the closing chapter of the LLM Primer II walkthrough. How to keep deepening your understanding after the book ends, the tools and libraries that turn the math into shipping work, and the bridge to the other books in the LLM Primer series.

2026-03-16

Chapter 12 — Building Your Own LLM System: From Datasets to Production

Chapter 12 of the LLM Primer I series. The final chapter. What it actually takes to build an LLM-powered system end to end — dataset licensing, training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, the integrated application stack, and the case-study patterns that distinguish successful deployments from failed pilots.

2026-03-01

Chapter 9 — Performance, Scaling, and Costs: The Real Engineering Trade-offs

Chapter 9 of the LLM Primer I series. The operational realities of running LLMs at scale — model size vs capability, the latency–throughput trade-off, cost economics, quantization, and edge deployment. Why frontier-tier models are often the wrong choice even when you can afford them.

2026-02-26

The LLM Primer Series — A Field Guide to Generative AI, Built One Volume at a Time

The LLM Primer Series — a completed seven-volume field guide to generative AI by Sho Shimoda. From foundations to security. Includes Physical AI as sister volume. All 7 volumes available on Amazon.

2026-02-15

5.3 Real-Time Deployment Challenges

A preview from Chapter 5.3: Explore latency, scalability, and optimization techniques for deploying large language models in real-time applications.

2024-10-01

5.2 Compute Resources and Cost

A preview from Chapter 5.2: Learn why LLMs demand massive compute power, what drives cost, and practical strategies to optimize performance and sustainability.

2024-09-30

5.1 Bias & Ethical Considerations

A preview from Chapter 5.1 of our book: uncover how large language models inherit bias and learn strategies to build fair, trustworthy AI.

2024-09-29