Introduction to Large Language Models

In about two hours it gives you the vocabulary to follow the conversation: what a model is actually doing, why prompting matters, where these systems fit and where they fall down. That's genuinely useful if you're a manager, writer or decision-maker who needs to reason about LLMs without building them — you'll come away able to ask better questions rather than to ship anything.

Just be clear on what it is not: there's no hands-on building here, so if you want to work with the APIs or fine-tune a model, this is the wrong course and a developer-focused one will serve you far better. Audit it free on Coursera, with a certificate that fits inside the free trial. The field moves quickly, so take it as a snapshot of the concepts rather than the latest state of play (as of 2026).

Introduction to Large Language Models is Google Cloud's bite-sized primer on what an LLM actually is, the situations where one is the right tool, and how prompt tuning changes what it outputs. It closes with a tour of Google's own generative AI development tooling, so it doubles as an orientation for anyone planning to build on Google Cloud's AI stack specifically.