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What is instruction tuning, and how does it differ from pretraining and alignment?

Instruction tuning is what turns a raw next-token predictor into something that follows instructions. The signal is placing it correctly in the pretrain to SFT to alignment pipeline and knowing exactly what it does and does not fix.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.

Instruction tuning is what turns a raw next-token predictor into something that follows instructions. The signal is placing it correctly in the pretrain to SFT to alignment pipeline and knowing exactly what it does and does not fix.

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