pretraining — The first, biggest phase of building a model: training it on enormous amounts of text so it learns language, facts, and reasoning in general.
Why it matters
If you're targeting a job at OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google DeepMind, most advice you'll find online comes from recruiters or people who interviewed there once — this comes from a technical lead actively building Gemini, who understands what the hiring bar actually looks like from the inside. That firsthand perspective on what frontier lab hiring managers value cuts through the noise of generic ML career content.
