Week 3: Behind the Scenes
Day 16: Training, Fine-Tuning, and Alignment
Goal
Understand the stages that shape model behavior.
Learn
Pretraining teaches broad patterns from large datasets. Fine-tuning teaches a model to behave better for specific tasks or domains. Alignment methods use human feedback, preference data, safety rules, and evaluations to make outputs more helpful and less harmful. None of these stages make a model perfect.
Behind the scenes
AI tools are products wrapped around models, data, prompts, retrieval, safety systems, and user interfaces. The better you understand the wrapper, the better your results get.Example
Example: in a real workflow, this idea helps you decide how to use AI carefully. For this lesson, connect the goal to one task you already do: understand the stages that shape model behavior..
Practice
Draw a simple pipeline: data -> pretraining -> fine-tuning -> safety/alignment -> app interface.
Checkpoint
Checkpoint
You can describe why two models can feel different even when both are chatbots.