How Language Models Work

Lesson 07

The assistant act

Answering questions is a learned costume.

A freshly trained model doesn’t answer questions. It continues text, like autocomplete that read the whole internet. The helpful assistant is a costume, added later.

How the costume goes on

Step 1: show it tens of thousands of example dialogues.

Q: How do I boil an egg?
A: Place the egg in boiling water for 7–9 minutes…

Q: Summarize this paragraph.
A: Here's the key point in two sentences…

Q: Write a limerick about soup.
A: There once was a chowder so thick…

Step 2: humans pick the better of two tries, and training leans toward the winners.

✓ preferred
“I'd check the oven temperature first. Uneven browning usually means it runs hot.”
“As an AI language model, baking is a complex topic with many variables to consider…”