Most people's first encounter with AI is through a chat interface, like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Chatbots are very useful, but the real power of AI in application development comes from being able to automate tasks that are difficult or impossible to do with code alone.
AI is a new type of programming primitive. Large language models (LLMs) let us write software which can process unstructured information in a common sense way.
Consider the task of writing a program to extract a list of people's names from the following paragraph:
Extracting names is easy for humans, but is very difficult using only traditional programming. Writing a general program to extract names from any paragraph is harder still.
However, with an LLM the task becomes almost trivial:
What's more, the same instruction can be used to extract names from any paragraph, and the same LLM can be used for a wide variety of tasks. The ability of LLMs to process unstructured information in a common sense way is very general, and can be applied across a wide range of tasks.
The next step is to gain some intuitions about how LLMs work in the context of programming.
Notebooks
The following notebooks demonstrate how to extract names from text using LLMs from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. These links open in Google Colab, where you can run the code yourself.
Read next → AI predicts text
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