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Language Models: The Brain of the Agent - Understanding AI's Core Technology

Michael Brenndoerfer•June 9, 2025•4 min read

Learn how language models work as the foundation of AI agents. Discover what powers ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI systems through intuitive explanations and practical Python examples.

Language Models: The Brain of the Agent

In Chapter 1, you learned what makes an AI agent different from a simple chatbot. An agent can perceive your goals, reason about how to achieve them, and take actions to get things done. But there's one critical component we haven't explored yet: the brain that powers all of this.

That brain is a language model.

Every AI agent needs some way to understand language and generate responses. Without this capability, the agent couldn't interpret your requests, couldn't reason through problems, and couldn't communicate its results. The language model is what makes all of that possible.

Think of it this way: if an AI agent is like a personal assistant, the language model is the assistant's mind. It's what allows the assistant to read your messages, think through what you're asking, and formulate coherent responses. Everything else we'll build (tools, memory, reasoning strategies) depends on this foundation.

What You'll Learn

In this chapter, we'll demystify language models. You'll learn:

  • How language models work using intuitive analogies (no advanced math required)
  • What language models can and can't do so you understand their strengths and limitations
  • How to use a language model in code with a simple, practical Python example

By the end, you'll understand the core technology that powers every AI agent, and you'll have written code that actually calls a language model to generate text. This foundation will prepare you for everything that comes next: prompting, reasoning, tools, and all the other capabilities that transform a language model into a capable agent.

A Quick Preview

Before we dive into the details, let's see what we're building toward. Here's a glimpse of how simple it can be to use a language model (we'll explain every part of this in the upcoming sections):

In[3]:
Code
from openai import OpenAI

## GPT-5 is ideal for basic prompting and text generation tasks
## It provides reliable, coherent responses for straightforward questions
client = OpenAI(api_key=os.getenv("OPENAI_API_KEY"))  # Replace with your actual API key

## Send a prompt to the model
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-5",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What is an AI agent?"}]
)

## Get the model's response
print(response.choices[0].message.content)
Out[3]:
Console
An AI agent is a software system that perceives its environment, reasons about what to do, and acts autonomously to achieve goals.

Key ideas:
- Sense–think–act loop: observe inputs (e.g., text, sensors, APIs) → plan/decide → take actions → observe results → adjust.
- Core components: perception, state/knowledge/memory, policy or planner, action/execution, and often learning to improve over time.
- Types:
  - Reactive vs. deliberative (planning) agents
  - Single-agent vs. multi-agent
  - Embodied (robots) vs. software-only (tools/APIs)
  - Rule-based vs. learning-based (including LLM-powered agents)
- Examples: customer support assistants, robotic vacuums, stock-trading bots, calendar/email assistants, game-playing bots, autonomous vehicles, workflow automations that use external tools.
- How it differs from a plain model: a model just maps inputs to outputs; an agent wraps models with goals, memory, tool use, and decision loops to act in the world.
- Limitations/considerations: reliability, safety/alignment, tool permissions, monitoring, data privacy, and evaluation of performance and side effects.

That's it. You send text in, you get text back. The language model reads your prompt and generates a response, one word (technically, one "token") at a time.

Of course, there's a lot happening under the hood. The model is drawing on patterns learned from billions of pages of text, calculating probabilities for what should come next, and generating coherent, contextually appropriate responses. But from your perspective as a developer, it's remarkably straightforward: you provide input, the model provides output.

Why This Matters

You might be wondering: if using a language model is so simple, why dedicate a whole chapter to it?

Because understanding how language models work changes how you build with them. When you know that models predict text based on patterns (rather than truly "understanding" meaning), you'll write better prompts. When you understand their limitations (like struggling with precise calculations or current events), you'll know when to add tools to compensate. When you grasp how context works, you'll design better memory systems for your agent.

The language model is the foundation. Everything we build in later chapters (prompting strategies, reasoning techniques, tool integration, memory systems) is about taking this powerful but imperfect text predictor and turning it into a reliable, capable agent.

The Path Ahead

We'll explore language models in two parts:

First, we'll look at how language models work in plain English. No neural network diagrams or calculus, just clear explanations and helpful analogies. You'll learn what happens during training, how models make predictions, and why they're good at some things but struggle with others.

Second, we'll get practical. You'll write actual Python code that calls a language model, sends it prompts, and processes its responses. This hands-on experience will give you the confidence to start building with language models right away.

Ready? Let's start by understanding what's really happening when a language model generates text.

Quiz

Ready to test your understanding? Take this quick quiz to reinforce what you've learned about language models and how they power AI agents.

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Reference

BIBTEXAcademic
@misc{languagemodelsthebrainoftheagentunderstandingaiscoretechnology, author = {Michael Brenndoerfer}, title = {Language Models: The Brain of the Agent - Understanding AI's Core Technology}, year = {2025}, url = {https://mbrenndoerfer.com/writing/language-models-brain-of-ai-agent}, organization = {mbrenndoerfer.com}, note = {Accessed: 2025-12-25} }
APAAcademic
Michael Brenndoerfer (2025). Language Models: The Brain of the Agent - Understanding AI's Core Technology. Retrieved from https://mbrenndoerfer.com/writing/language-models-brain-of-ai-agent
MLAAcademic
Michael Brenndoerfer. "Language Models: The Brain of the Agent - Understanding AI's Core Technology." 2025. Web. 12/25/2025. <https://mbrenndoerfer.com/writing/language-models-brain-of-ai-agent>.
CHICAGOAcademic
Michael Brenndoerfer. "Language Models: The Brain of the Agent - Understanding AI's Core Technology." Accessed 12/25/2025. https://mbrenndoerfer.com/writing/language-models-brain-of-ai-agent.
HARVARDAcademic
Michael Brenndoerfer (2025) 'Language Models: The Brain of the Agent - Understanding AI's Core Technology'. Available at: https://mbrenndoerfer.com/writing/language-models-brain-of-ai-agent (Accessed: 12/25/2025).
SimpleBasic
Michael Brenndoerfer (2025). Language Models: The Brain of the Agent - Understanding AI's Core Technology. https://mbrenndoerfer.com/writing/language-models-brain-of-ai-agent
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