Prompting, Fine-Tuning, or RAG

Know the Vocabulary

This lesson uses the terms below many times. Read them once now, and come back here when a later section needs one.

• Base model: A general-purpose large language model (LLM) that its maker trained on a huge amount of text. You adapt it to your product; you do not build it.
• Prompt: Everything sent to the model in one call. It holds instructions, examples, the conversation so far, and any documents.
• Token: The unit of text a model reads and writes, roughly three-quarters of an English word. Providers charge for every token sent and returned.