TDM 19000: Week 1 Notes (Introduction)

Notes from Monday, July 13, 2026

During week 1, in your Jupyter Lab session, please be sure to use The Data Mine Jupyter Labl notebook, with 4 cores per session.
Example screenshot showing how to select 4 CPU cores and 8GB RAM

A Large Language Model (LLM) is a type of artificial intelligence that is designed to understand, process, and generate text in a human-like fashion. These models are trained using self-supervised machine learning on vast amounts of data. A common reason this is done is to complete natural language processing tasks - such as language generation that you will find in AI chatbots.

Ollama is a tool that lets you run LLMs locally on your computer or a server without too many complex commands. Rather than calling an online API, Ollama downloads the chosen model and runs in directly in your environment. Ollama lets you :

  • download AI models,

  • run them locally,

  • ask them questions (from the command line),

  • customize and build models.