AI Glossary
Base Model
What is Base Model?
A pre-trained language model that has learned from large-scale data but has not yet been fine-tuned for specific tasks or instruction-following. Base models produce text completions rather than assistant-style responses. Most consumer AI products are instruction-tuned versions of base models, not the base models themselves.
Example in practice
A developer who downloads a raw Llama base model and finds it completes text rather than following instructions is encountering a base model — they would need to fine-tune or apply instruction tuning before deploying it as an assistant.
Learn more
See Base Model applied in a professional context through this free course.
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