Find Answers to Your Questions About eSkilled AI Course Creator

What is a large language model (LLM)?

An LLM is an artificial intelligence model designed to understand and generate human language. These models are based on architectures like the Transformer and trained on large amounts of text data to learn grammar, semantics, language patterns, and other aspects of human language.

LLMs can perform different language-related tasks like answering questions, summarising texts, generating written content, translating languages, and more. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is an example of an LLM specifically tailored to generate human-like responses in a conversational format. The acronym emphasises the model’s ability to effectively handle large-scale data and complex language processing tasks.

How do LLMs work?

Like generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), LLMs operate on machine learning principles and natural language processing (NLP). They are trained using various text data like books, websites, articles and other sources to learn the structure and nuances of language. Here’s an overview of how they work:

• Training Data: LLMs are trained on vast datasets consisting of text from the web, helping them learn a wide range of language patterns, idioms, and the semantics of different words and phrases.
• Neural Networks: The core of LLMs, neural networks are specifically designed with architectures such as the Transformer. These networks comprise layers that perform complex transformations on the input data.
• Attention Mechanism: Transformer models use an ‘attention mechanism’ to assess the significance of various words in the input data. This enables the model to concentrate on relevant sections of text when predicting the next word or generating a response.
• Pre-Training: Models are pre-trained on ‘language modelling’, which involves predicting the next word in a sentence while taking previous words into account. This teaches the model the likelihood of a word appearing after a given sequence of words.
• Fine-Tuning: After pre-training, the model can be fine-tuned to perform specific tasks like summarisation, question-answering, or translation. This involves additional training where the model is optimised to perform on a particular type of data or task.
• Generating Text: When generating text, the model takes a user-provided prompt and produces one word (or token) at a time. It selects the next word based on the probabilities it learned during training, always trying to pick the most likely next word until it reaches a stopping criterion.
• Context Understanding: Thanks to the training and the internal structure, LLMs can understand context to a certain extent, allowing for coherent and contextually appropriate responses.
• Iterative Learning: LLMs can improve over time with more data and fine-tuning, adjusting their parameters to better fit the linguistic patterns they encounter.

However, LLMs have limitations. They can sometimes generate inaccurate information, exhibit biases in their training data, and lack a true understanding of language as humans do. Still, they are powerful tools for a variety of language tasks.

Which LLM does eSkilled use?

eSkilled uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o as the basis for AI Course Creator.

What are the benefits of GPT-4o?

eSkilled has chosen to power our AI Course Creator with GPT-4o because of the several key advantages that it offers over older models like GPT-4 or GPT-3.5:

• Superior Content Quality: GPT-4o’s advanced capabilities ensure that content is coherent, contextually relevant, and academically sound. This is vital in educational settings where clarity and accuracy are essential.
  Our system also ensures that materials are rich in quality and depth to engage learners and enhance outcomes.
• Enhanced Speed and Efficiency: GPT-4o processes information and creates content faster than earlier versions, enabling our AI Course Creator to generate course materials and assessments quicker than most competitors.
• Greater Scalability: With GPT-4o, AI Course Creator can scale to meet growing demand without compromising performance. No matter the size of your organisation, our system can easily handle increased loads while ensuring that all users receive the same seamless experience.
• Future-Ready Technology: Using the latest AI technology, eSkilled ensures that our educational tools are future-proof, requiring fewer upgrades and staying ahead of educational trends and methodologies.
• Energy Efficiency & Cost-Effectiveness: Despite its advanced capabilities, GPT-4o is more energy and computationally efficient, allowing us to keep operational costs low. This cost efficiency is passed on to you, making our system the most advanced and economical over time.
• Environmental Considerations: eSkilled is committed to sustainability, and GPT-4o’s energy efficiency reduces power usage. This minimises our carbon footprint and aligns with our environmental responsibility.

Many other AI course creation tools use GPT-3.5 because it’s cheaper, allowing providers to offer lower price points or free tiers. At eSkilled, we believe the higher quality of output we achieve using GPT-4o means higher quality, more relevant courses, and less work for you to do before you can go to market with your training content.

GPT-4o is also considerably quicker to generate content, so you and your team don’t have to idle around while waiting for outputs at a significant financial and opportunity cost.

How does eSkilled AI Course Creator differ from ChatGPT or another AI chat tool?

eSkilled’s AI Course Creator uses LLM technology but adds considerable value compared to a traditional AI chat tool like ChatGPT. Thousands of hours were spent programming the platform and training the LLM to create course content in a style and format suited to training, following the ‘tell-show-do’ training philosophy, and continually improving the system.

eSkilled’s system applies a considerable amount of prompt engineering behind the scenes, which you don’t see. This makes it much faster and easier to generate high-quality training content already formatted in a training context. AI Course Creator also publishes course content directly in e-Learning format, eliminating the need for additional subscriptions or hiring a developer to convert them for you.

With enough time and the right prompts, skilled instructional designers may be able to get similar outputs from AI chat tools. However, there is still a considerable time cost involved in planning the course structure, asking the right questions, compiling all the outputs, formatting them, and creating the e-Learning version. eSkilled does the same thing with few questions and clicks, including outputting to e-Learning format ready for LMS integration via LTI, potentially saving you many hours or days per course.

Most instructional designers enjoy massive time and cost savings using eSkilled AI Course Creator. Others also save on subscriptions as they don’t need to maintain separate or multiple AI chat tool subscriptions, which means they don’t need another e-Learning conversion tool.

What are AI hallucinations?

In rare cases, LLMs have been known to output false information known as ‘hallucinations’. We have a longer article explaining AI hallucinations here.