Part 3/13:

Progression in AI Capabilities

The evolution of large language models (LLMs) can be characterized across five distinct phases:

1. Basic Text Generation

Early models like GPT-3.5 provided simple text outputs from prompts, with a limited context window and no external interaction capabilities.

1. Enhanced Contextual Understanding

Introduction of larger context windows (up to 100,000 tokens by Anthropic), enabling models to process entire documents or datasets and maintain contextual awareness across lengthy interactions.

1. Tool Integration and External Access

The advent of capabilities such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) allows models to access and query external databases, documents, or APIs in real-time, significantly expanding functional scope.