What is model training?
Model training is how a vendor builds or updates a model from a large set of examples. Pretraining is the broad first pass. Fine-tuning is a later, narrower pass. Neither one is the afternoon you spend teaching your crew how to use the tool.
Also called: pretraining
In plain English
When someone says 'we need to train the AI,' ask which they mean. Teaching the receptionist to paste only the booking facts is staff training. Uploading your SOP for search is retrieval. Paying to change the model's weights is fine-tuning. The vendor's pretraining already happened before you signed up. Training is how the model learned before you showed up. Your prompts do not retrain it unless the vendor says your data is used that way, and you should read that sentence in their current docs. Assume a chat is not a private lesson the model keeps. If a setting offers to improve their models with your content, decide on purpose. Do not click past it.
How an owner would use it
Spend the training budget on the crew and on cleaner files. Ask a vendor who offers training whether your chats are in or out, and read their current policy. Do not hand over a customer export because a salesperson called it training data.
Common mistakes
Saying yes to 'training' on a call without asking whose data and which model is how a customer list leaves the building. Staff training and model training share a word and not a job. Do not expect pretraining to know your prices. Do not fine-tune to fix a single bad draft.
A worked example
A driving school
The instructors learn the tool, the model stays stock
This is an illustration, not a customer result. The owner runs a one-hour session on drafting lesson reminders from the schedule export. Students' license numbers stay out of the chat. Nobody sends a folder of past students to be 'trained in.' The reminders are checked against the schedule.
Related terms
Prompts and guides
Questions owners ask
What is model training?
It is the vendor's process of teaching a model from examples, including the original pretraining and any later fine-tuning. It is not a staff meeting.
How should a small business think about training data?
Assume your chats might be usable by the vendor unless their current docs say otherwise, and do not upload data you would not want in that position. Prefer retrieval of your own files over sending a corpus to be trained.
What is pretraining?
Pretraining is the large first phase that gives a model general language ability before you ever see it. You do not run it. You inherit its gaps, including the knowledge cutoff.
Product guides are on AI apps for business.