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Family

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.

LLM Family vs Lineage

Why “Family” Matters in the World of LLMs

When GPU bills run into six digits and every millisecond of latency counts, platform teams learn that vocabulary choices and hidden-unit counts aren’t the only things that separate one model checkpoint from another.

LLMs travel in families—lineages of models that share a common architecture, tokenizer, and training recipe. Think of them the way you might think of Apple’s M-series chips or Toyota’s Prius line: the tuning changes, the size varies, but the underlying design stays stable enough that tools, drivers, and workflows remain interchangeable.

In this blog, we will learn about what we mean by a family for LLMs and why this matters for Inference.

LLM Family