The Illustrated GenAI Interview, Part 1: LLM basics

Interviewers start here, and so should you. These eight questions are the base every later answer builds on.

Questions covered:

• Q1. What is a large language model (LLM), and how does it write text?

• Q2. What are tokens, and why should you care?

• Q3. What is a context window?

• Q4. What is "attention" in a transformer?

• Q5. What do temperature, top-k and top-p do?

• Q6. What are embeddings?

• Q7. Why do LLMs make things up (hallucinate), and how do you reduce it?

• Q8. What is a reasoning model, and when would you use one?

Each question gives you a plain-words answer, a real example, why interviewers ask it, and a color-coded diagram with a step-by-step walkthrough.

Format: two PDFs, US Letter: a dark screen edition (24 pages) and a light print edition (23 pages), with bookmarks and links to every question.

Builds on: nothing. Start here.

Want all 50? The complete book has all nine parts plus a quick review and a 7-day plan, for less than buying the parts one by one.

From Kronos Automation (kronosautomation.com).