Unit 3: Pretraining and fine-tuning

Published

April 27, 2026

In this unit, you will get an overview of different issues related to the development of large language models, with a focus on the pretraining stage. In particular, the unit covers the issue of data, scaling laws, the systems perspective, and the impact of LLMs on the environment.

Lectures

The lectures begin by introducing the key stages in LLM development. Next, you will learn how LLMs are pretrained and how large-scale datasets and scaling laws shape their performance. Finally, the lectures explore the fine-tuning of LLMs.

Section Title Video Slides
3.1 Introduction to LLM development video slides
3.2 Pretraining LLMs video slides
3.3 Data for LLM pretraining video slides
3.4 Scaling laws video slides
3.5 Efficient fine-tuning video slides
3.6 Training LLMs to follow instructions video slides

Additional materials

(none)

Assignment

Link to the assignmnent