What is InstructLab?

InstructLab is an open source project for enhancing large language models (LLMs) used in generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) applications. Created by IBM and Red Hat, the InstructLab community project provides a cost-effective solution for improving the alignment of LLMs and opens the doors for those with minimal machine learning experience to contribute.

LLMs can power a range of useful applications like chatbots and coding assistants. These LLMs can be proprietary (such as OpenAI’s GPT models and Anthropic’s Claude models) or offer varying degrees of openness around pretraining data and usage restrictions (such as Meta’s Llama models, Mistral AI’s Mistral models, and IBM’s Granite models). AI practitioners often need to adapt a pretrained LLM to suit a particular business purpose. But there are limits to the ways you can modify an LLM:

InstructLab follows an approach that punches through those limitations. It can enhance an LLM using far less human-generated information and far fewer computing resources than are typically used to retrain a model. And it makes it possible for upstream contributions to continuously make the model better.

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