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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

Instruction Tuned. It indicates that thinking tokens (eg <think> </think>) are not included in training.

That’s not what it means. "-it" just indicates the model is instruction-tuned, i.e. trained to follow prompts and behave like an assistant. It doesn’t imply anything about whether thinking tokens like <think>....</think> were included or excluded during training. Thats a separate design choice and varies by model.

What does that mean for a user of the model? Is the "-it" version more direct with solutions or something?

Use the it versions. The other versions are base models without post-training. E.g. base models are trained to regurgitate raw wikipedia, books, etc. Then these base models are post-trained into instruction-tuned models where they learn to act as a chat assistant.

It means that model was tuned to to act as chat bot. So write a reply on behalf of assistant and stop generating (by inserting special "end of turn" token to signal inference engine to stop generation).

Base model (without instruction/chat tuning) just generates text non stop ("autocomplete on steroids") and text is not necessarily even formatted as chat -- most text in training data isn't dialogue, after all.

good old illustrtation: https://www.ml6.eu/en/blog/large-language-models-to-fine-tun...

The it- one is the yellow smiling dot, the pt- is the rightmost monster head.

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