AI / LLM Basics Interview Questions
What is Pretraining in the context of LLMs?
Pretraining is the initial, large-scale training phase where a model learns general language patterns by predicting the next token across a massive, broad corpus of text.
- Typically uses text scraped from books, websites, code, and other large-scale sources
- Requires enormous computational resources, often running across thousands of specialized chips for weeks or months
- Produces a base model with broad language understanding, but not yet tuned for any specific task or conversational behavior
Pretraining is what gives an LLM its raw capability, everything that happens afterward, fine-tuning, alignment, and so on, builds on top of this foundation rather than replacing it.
What does pretraining teach a model to do?
What does pretraining produce?
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