11-766 Large Language Model Applications

12 units, Carnegie Mellon University

Large language models are used today for many more applications than just modelling language. In this course, we learn how Transformer-based neural language models have been adapted for applications ranging from web agents and retrieval systems to music generation and coding and writing assistants. We will systematically examine the ways different applications adapt the base technologies underlying large language models through varying choices in pre-training and fine-tuning data, model architecture, training objective, and usage of inference-time compute. This class is intended for students who have already learned the basics of how language models are implemented and are curious to develop an understanding of the advanced techniques used for customizing them to different applications.

Prerequisites: none listed

Offered: Spring 2027, Spring 2026

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