
LLM Training in 2026: What to Know Before You Build
TL;DR LLM training is the process of teaching a language model to predict text, then adapting it to follow instructions and match human preferences. It runs in three stages, which are pre-training on trillions of tokens, fine-tuning on task data, and post-training alignment with methods such as RLHF and DPO. Most enterprises start from an open-weight foundation model and fine-tune





