Historical milestone · 2022
Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback
Reviewed through September 18, 2026
2022 · Historical milestone
Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback
- Era
- 2020s
- Theme
- Language models & representation
- Evidence form
- Preference-learning experiment
- School / paradigm
- Human feedback / post-training
- Institution / context
- OpenAI
- Researchers
- Long Ouyang; collaborators
Understand
Plain-language record, transferred from the reviewed source module.
Theory or experimental setup. Combined supervised demonstrations, a learned preference model, and proximal-policy optimization for instruction following.
Result / historical claim. Smaller post-trained models were preferred to a much larger base model on the reported prompt distribution.
Apply
Professional implication, only where the reviewed record states one.
The checked-in record does not state a separate professional application for this entry. The topic page places it in the wider research lineage: .
Verify
Evidence status, stated limitations, and the external sources this record actually carries.
Evidence form. Preference-learning experiment
Limitation / debate. Results depended on labeler populations, prompt distribution, reward-model coverage, and resistance to reward gaming.
Source status. This milestone row does not carry a primary-source URL in the approved export, and we do not have a verified link for it in our own research. We do not guess one.
No primary-source URL is recorded for this entry in our reviewed data. Rather than manufacture a citation, we link the Implement Agentic research page that carries the record.
Reproduce
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A reproduction tutorial is not yet available for this entry. The closest reviewed material is .
Cite or share
APA-like: This historical record carries a year only, and no author or publisher of record in the checked-in data. An APA reference would have to invent that metadata.
BibTeX: BibTeX requires an author and publication venue. Historical lineage entries store a narrative record and its source link, not structured authorship, so the field would be fabricated.