Definition
Plain language
Teaching a model to follow what users ask by training it on lots of example instructions paired with good responses.
As stated in the literature
A post-training stage that fine-tunes a base language model on (instruction, response) pairs so it follows natural-language commands rather than merely continuing text; typically precedes RLHF and is implicated in side effects like calibration loss, mode collapse, and commitment sharpening.
Also called: instruction-tuned, instruction tuned, instruction-tuning
Why it matters: It turns a raw text predictor into something that follows directions, which is what makes a chatbot usable for ordinary requests.
For example, training a model on many pairs like 'Summarize this paragraph' followed by a good summary teaches it to actually do what users ask instead of just continuing the text.
Heard on the show
“Months of instruction tuning and reinforcement learning have shaped them into helpful, agreeable assistants, so of course one of them says "let's both cooperate.”Episode 234 — Two Copies of Gemini Cooperated in a Game Where Betrayal Always Pays