How models work

Reasoning model

A language model trained to work through a problem in intermediate steps before answering, often called thinking. It tends to do better on maths, logic, coding and multi-step planning, at the cost of slower and more expensive responses. It can still reason its way to a wrong answer.


Where this is taught

5Meet the models
Language, image, speech and video models; open and closed; large and small; reasoning models: the kinds of model behind the tools, and who makes them.

Related terms

Attention

The mechanism in a transformer that lets the model weigh how relevant each token is to every other token when working …

Backpropagation

The technique that calculates how much each weight in a neural network contributed to an error, working backwards from…

Base model

A model straight out of pretraining, before it has been tuned to follow instructions or hold a conversation. Given a q…

Chain of thought

Step-by-step reasoning written out before a final answer, either prompted ('think it through step by step') or built i…

Compute

Shorthand for the processing power used to train and run AI models, usually on large clusters of specialised chips in …

Constitutional AI

A training approach, published by Anthropic in 2022, in which a model critiques and revises its own responses against …

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