From Autocomplete to Assistants: The Three Stages of LLM Development

Most developers conflate different LLM types, but foundation, instruct, and chat models are fundamentally distinct products of separate training stages—each with unique capabilities and behavior. This distinction matters because using the wrong model or prompting technique produces unexpectedly poor results. The tutorial demonstrates with hands-on examples why a foundation model behaves as a text completer while chat models function as intelligent assistants.