Hands-On Large Language Models (Ch 7 & 8)

We are discussing the recently released Hands-On Large Language Models by Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst. This book combines the essential theory with a practical focus and is written by two highly regarded experts from the LLM space.

This meetup will be to review and discuss the chapters:
7. Advanced Text Generation Techniques and Tools
8. Semantic Search and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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Book overview
Through the book's visually educational nature, readers can learn practical tools and concepts they need to use these capabilities today.

You'll understand how to use pretrained large language models for use cases like copywriting and summarization; create semantic search systems that go beyond keyword matching; and use existing libraries and pretrained models for text classification, search, and clusterings.

This book purports to help you:

• Understand the architecture of Transformer language models that excel at text generation and representation
• Build advanced LLM pipelines to cluster text documents and explore the topics they cover
• Build semantic search engines that go beyond keyword search, using methods like dense retrieval and rerankers
• Explore how generative models can be used, from prompt engineering all the way to retrieval-augmented generation
• Gain a deeper understanding of how to train LLMs and optimize them for specific applications using generative model fine-tuning, contrastive fine-tuning, and in-context learning