The LLM Lifecycle Map

Pre-training, post-training, inference, adaptation: the map this whole academy is organized around, and who does what at each stage.

Content last verified 2026-09.

Lessons

1. The Map: Four Stages of a Model’s Life
2. Who Does What: Labs, Platforms, Builders
3. Reading This Site with the Map

Sources

• Brown et al. (2020) — Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (GPT-3: pre-training at scale, adaptation without weight updates)
• Ouyang et al. (2022) — Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback (InstructGPT: the post-training stage)
• Lewis et al. (2020) — Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks (RAG: adaptation without retraining)