LLM Fundamentals

A reference covering how Large Language Models work — from transformer internals and training pipelines to quantization formats, model serving, and production deployment.

Summary

Large Language Models (LLMs) are neural networks trained on internet-scale text data to predict the next token in a sequence. Built on the transformer architecture (Vaswani et al., 2017), they use self-attention mechanisms to process relationships between all elements in a sequence simultaneously. When scaled to billions of parameters and trillions of training tokens, emergent capabilities like reasoning, code generation, and multi-step planning appear.

The modern LLM lifecycle spans four major phases:

1. Pretraining — next-token prediction on trillions of tokens to build a broad knowledge base
2. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) — instruction-following on curated prompt-response pairs
3. Alignment — RLHF or DPO to align outputs with human preferences
4. Deployment — quantization, serving engines, distributed inference, and scaling

Key Concepts at a Glance

Concept	What It Is	Details
Transformer	Core neural network architecture	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#transformer-architecture
Self-Attention	Mechanism to weigh token relationships (QKV)	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#self-attention-mechanism
FFN / SwiGLU	Feed-forward network with gated activation	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#inside-a-transformer-block
RMSNorm / Pre-LN	Normalization and placement in transformer blocks	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#inside-a-transformer-block
MoE	Mixture of Experts — sparse activation	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#mixture-of-experts-moe
Tokenization	Breaking text into sub-word units (BPE)	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#tokenization-and-embeddings
RoPE / ALiBi	Positional encoding methods	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#positional-encoding-methods
FP16 / BF16 / FP8	Floating-point precision formats	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#floating-point-bit-layout
Quantization	Reducing weight precision (FP16→INT4)	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#quantization-formats
GGUF / GPTQ / AWQ / EXL2	Model file and quantization formats	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#model-formats-and-quantization-methods
MLX	Apple Silicon ML framework	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#mlx-apple-silicon
Training Pipeline	Pretraining → SFT → RLHF/DPO	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#training-pipeline
Distillation	Teacher-student model compression	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#knowledge-distillation
Scaling Laws	Training and inference-time compute scaling	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#scaling-laws
Model Merging	Combining fine-tuned models (TIES, DARE, SLERP)	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/architecture#model-merging
VRAM Estimation	Calculating GPU memory requirements	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/operations#vram-estimation
GPU Selection	Hardware selection guide	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/operations#gpu-hardware-selection-guide
LoRA / QLoRA	Parameter-efficient fine-tuning	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/operations#parameter-efficient-fine-tuning-peft
RAG	Retrieval-Augmented Generation	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/operations#retrieval-augmented-generation-rag
KV Cache	Key-Value cache for inference speedup	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/operations#inference-optimization
Speculative Decoding	Draft-model parallel decoding (DFlash 2, EAGLE, DEFT)	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/operations#speculative-decoding · deep dive: DFlash 2
vLLM / TensorRT	Production serving engines	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/operations#serving-engines
Benchmarks	MMLU, HumanEval, Arena ELO, and more	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/operations#evaluation-benchmarks
Structured Output	Constrained decoding, JSON mode	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/operations#structured-output-and-constrained-decoding
Safety / Guardrails	Content filtering, prompt injection defense	ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/operations#safety-guardrails-and-content-filtering

Evaluation

Dimension	Rating	Notes
Maturity	High	Transformer architecture is battle-tested since 2017. MoE dominant since 2024
Ecosystem	Massive	Hugging Face, llama.cpp, vLLM, Ollama, MLX, NVIDIA TensorRT
Accessibility	Improving	QLoRA enables fine-tuning 65B models on a single 48GB GPU
Local Inference	Strong	GGUF + llama.cpp / MLX run 7B-30B models on consumer hardware

Sources

• Alisa's Math Notes (Notion) — probability, statistics, combinatorics, and MLE reference for ML practitioners. See ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/ref - alisa-math-notes
• Alisa's Book of LLMs (Notion) — derivation-heavy transformer internals, post-training (PPO/RLHF/GRPO/DPO), parallelism, and multimodality. See ai-agents/llm-fundamentals/ref - alisa-book-of-llms
• Attention Is All You Need (Vaswani et al., 2017) — the original transformer paper
• Large Language Model — Wikipedia
• Transformer (deep learning architecture) — Wikipedia
• How Transformers Work — DataCamp
• What Are LLMs — IBM
• Transformer Explainer — Georgia Tech
• How Do Transformers Work — Hugging Face
• MoE LLMs — Cameron R. Wolfe
• DeepSeekMoE Paper
• MoE Infrastructure — Introl
• MoE Explained — LocalAIMaster
• MoE Powers Frontier Models — NVIDIA
• Comprehensive GGUF Analysis — Furkan Gozukara
• AI Quantization Guide 2025 — Local AI Zone
• LLM Quantization: BF16 vs FP8 vs INT4 — AIMultiple
• GGUF Q4 Q8 FP16 Guide — D-Central
• Picking the Right Size Brain — InstaSD
• LLM Quantization Explained 2026 — VRLA Tech
• Quantization Methods Compared — ai.rs
• Quantization Formats — CraftRigs
• Quantization Overview — Hugging Face Transformers docs — GGUF/AWQ/GPTQ/bitsandbytes methods compared
• MLX Framework — Apple
• Exploring LLMs with MLX on M5 — Apple ML Research
• MLX GitHub Repository
• Knowledge Distillation — IBM
• Student-Teacher Distillation Guide — DEV Community
• Knowledge Distillation for LLMs — Newline
• DPO — Cameron R. Wolfe
• RLHF Explained — IntuitionLabs
• LLM Training Methodologies 2025 — Klizos
• SFT Guide — Thunder Compute
• LoRA and QLoRA — Analytics Vidhya
• Fine-Tuning Infrastructure — Introl
• Efficient Fine-Tuning with LoRA — Databricks
• PEFT — Hugging Face GitHub
• vLLM Production Deployment — Introl
• vLLM Deep Dive — martinuke0
• LLM Inference Optimization — Clarifai
• Mastering LLM Inference Optimization — NVIDIA
• KV Cache Management Survey
• Optimizing Inference — Hugging Face
• Context Window & Token Guide — QubitTool
• LLM Tokenizers — DigitalOcean
• LLM Serving Guide — Inference.net

Architecture Internals

• Transformer Design Guide Part 2 — Rohit Bandaru
• LLaMA Components: RMSNorm, SwiGLU, RoPE — Michael Brenndoerfer
• Advanced Transformer Architectures — Nebius Academy
• Pre-LN vs Post-LN — APXML
• Positional Embeddings: RoPE & ALiBi — Towards Data Science
• ALiBi Deep Dive: Interpolation vs Extrapolation — SambaNova
• FP16 vs BF16 Explained — Furkan Gozukara
• BF16 vs FP16 Key Differences — Bitfern

Model Merging

• Model Merging for LLMs — NVIDIA
• Merge LLMs with MergeKit — Hugging Face
• Model Merging Survey — Cameron R. Wolfe

VRAM & GPU

• Calculating GPU Memory for LLMs — BentoML
• How Much VRAM for Inference — Modal
• How Much VRAM for Fine-Tuning — Modal

RAG

• What is RAG — IBM
• What is RAG — AWS
• RAG Infrastructure — Introl
• RAG in 2025 Strategies — Morphik

Benchmarks

• LLM Benchmarks Compared — LXT
• AI Benchmarks Guide — Analytics Vidhya
• 30 LLM Evaluation Benchmarks — Evidently AI

Structured Output

• Constrained Decoding Guide — Aidan Cooper
• Structured Decoding in vLLM — vLLM Blog

Safety & Guardrails

• NeMo Guardrails — NVIDIA GitHub
• LLM Security & Guardrails — Langfuse
• Bypassing Guardrails (2025 Research) — arXiv

Questions

• How will post-transformer architectures like Mamba (state-space models) reshape the LLM landscape?
• What is the practical floor for quantization before quality degrades unacceptably for agentic/tool-use workflows?
• Will disaggregated prefill/decode (NVIDIA Dynamo, llm-d) become the default serving pattern?
• How will Apple's MLX ecosystem evolve with M5/M6 unified memory scaling?