Family vs. Lineage: Unpacking Two Often-Confused Ideas in the LLM World
LLMs have begun to resemble sprawling family trees. Folks that are relatively new to LLMs will notice two words appear constantly in technical blogs: "family" and "lineage".
They sound interchangeable and users frequently conflate them. But, they describe different slices of an LLM’s life story.
Important
Understanding the differences is more than trivia. This determines how you pick models, tune them, and keep inference predictable at scale.
