Why LLMs Shouldn’t Follow Instructions (But Do)

A pretrained language model can predict text, but it doesn’t know how to help you. In this video, we break down how raw LLMs are transformed into instruction-following assistants like ChatGPT. You’ll learn how fine-tuning, human preference data, and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) reshape a model’s behavior — without changing its architecture. We cover: Why next-token prediction alone is not enough Supervised fine-tuning with instruction–response pairs How human rankings become a reward model What RLHF actually optimizes (and what it doesn’t) How safety, refusals, and “hel…