LLM — A large language model — the neural network behind tools like Claude and ChatGPT, trained on huge amounts of text to predict what comes next.
fine-tuning — Taking a trained model and training it a bit more on your own examples so it gets better at one specific job.
grounding — Tying a model's answers to checkable sources — retrieved documents, live data, tool results — instead of letting it answer from memory alone.
alignment — The work of making AI systems actually pursue what their builders and users intend, rather than something subtly or dangerously different.
Why it matters
Names the failure modes before you start: a smaller filtered dataset often beats a larger raw one, and synthetic data can encode biases that leave the domain model less trustworthy than the base.