Large language model (LLM)
A system trained to predict the next word. Everything it does follows from that.
A large language model is trained on a very large amount of text to answer one question over and over: given the text so far, what comes next? Out of that comes something that looks a great deal like understanding.
Its strength is form. It has read the pattern of nearly every kind of document, so it can produce a competitor teardown, a cold email or a script with little prompting. Its weakness is the same fact read the other way: producing the form of a citation is not the same as having a source, and the model cannot tell the two apart from the inside.
Find your way around
Learn it in the course, copy it from a playbook, see it work in a case study.