Operators, product owners, and people affected by the foundation models decision.
Transformers · weeks 20
Foundation-model lifecycle
A private support assistant must answer from evidence and resist manipulation.
Opening production brief
A measurable problem, before a model.
build vs buy, RAG vs tuning, provenance, decontamination with version, owner, event time, and availability contracts.
A private support assistant must answer from evidence and resist manipulation. Every solution must state latency, cost, capacity, and fallback limits.
Offline evidence plus a deployable resolution: A grounded system design spanning adaptation, RAG, evaluation, and safety.
Frame and baseline
Turn the production problem into explicit data, metric, and baseline contracts.
- 01↗
Prompt, retrieve, adapt, train, or buy?
Use prompt, retrieve, adapt, train, or buy? to move the foundation models production brief toward a defensible release.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab - 02↗
Corpus provenance, mixtures, and decontamination
Use corpus provenance, mixtures, and decontamination to move the foundation models production brief toward a defensible release.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab
Build and stress
Formalize the machinery, test counterexamples, and expose system limits.
- 03↗
Pretraining objectives, scaling, and checkpoints
Use pretraining objectives, scaling, and checkpoints to move the foundation models production brief toward a defensible release.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab - 04↗
SFT, preference optimization, safety, and tools
Use sft, preference optimization, safety, and tools to move the foundation models production brief toward a defensible release.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab
Resolve and operate
Join model behavior to architecture, observability, rollout, and rollback.
- 05↗
Evals, model cards, feedback, and reproducibility
Use evals, model cards, feedback, and reproducibility to move the foundation models production brief toward a defensible release.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab - HW↗
Domain adaptation release package
Compare prompt, retrieval, and optional PEFT approaches under one provenance and evaluation contract.
Rubric · staged hints · reference resolution
Prerequisite guidance
1 concepts make this faster.
Prerequisites are guidance, never hard gates.