In the first post of this series, we explored the core differences between traditional AI and generative AI — what they do, how they behave, and when to use them.
Now let’s go a level deeper and look at how these systems are trained. Why does it matter? Because the way a model is trained impacts:
- What kind of data you need
- How expensive it is to build or adapt
- What kind of problems it can solve
- How you integrate it into your product
And if you’re leading product or engineering, understanding this difference is critical to setting the right expectations with your teams and stakeholders.
Traditional AI: Supervised, Structured, and Specific
The training process in traditional AI is generally straightforward:
- You collect structured data (like rows in a spreadsheet).
- You label that data — e.g., “spam” vs. “not spam”, or “high risk” vs. “low risk”.
- You train a model (e.g., a decision tree, SVM, or logistic regression) to learn from those labels.
- The model outputs a predictive function you can apply to future data.
This is called supervised learning, and it’s the foundation of most traditional ML use cases.
🔁 The cycle looks like this: Data → Labels → Train → Predict → Evaluate → Improve
💡 A few characteristics:
- Models are trained for one specific task
- They’re relatively lightweight in terms of compute
- You need domain-relevant labeled data
- Accuracy and performance are tightly scoped
🛠 Example: You want to predict customer churn. You feed in historical user data (logins, activity, cancellations), label who churned and who didn’t, and the model learns patterns that might indicate future churn.
It’s a focused, controllable process — and that’s what makes it so powerful in well-defined business scenarios.
Generative AI: Pretrained, Massive, and Universal
In contrast, generative AI doesn’t start with a narrowly labeled dataset.
Instead, it starts with huge amounts of unstructured data — like books, websites, images, code, or social conversations — and learns general patterns through self-supervised pretraining.
Here’s what that looks like with a language model:
- The model reads billions of words from publicly available content or provided training data.
- It learns to predict the next word in a sentence — over and over.
- Over time, it forms a deep, statistical understanding of language.
- This becomes a foundation model: capable of performing a wide range of tasks.
This process is often referred to as pretraining, and it’s what powers tools like GPT-4, Claude, and other LLMs available in the market today.
🔁 The cycle looks more like: Massive Unlabeled Data → Pretrain → (Optional Fine-Tune) → Prompt → Generate → Feedback Loop
💡 Key traits:
- Requires massive compute (often GPUs/TPUs at scale)
- Trained once, then reused across many tasks
- You don’t train from scratch—you adapt or prompt
- You can use APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) or open-source models
🛠 Example: You want to summarize customer feedback. Instead of building a model from scratch, you prompt an LLM: “Summarize the following feedback into 3 key themes.”
No labels. No custom model training. Just a prompt-based interface on top of a pre-trained model.
🧠 vs. 🌍 Why the Training Difference Matters
| Traditional AI | Generative AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Data type | Structured, labeled | Unstructured, unlabeled |
| Training method | Supervised learning | Self-supervised pretraining |
| Data ownership | Typically internal / proprietary | Public internet-scale (plus private fine-tuning) |
| Cost of training | Lower (can be done in-house) | Extremely high (millions in compute) |
| Customization | Build from scratch for each task | Fine-tune or prompt an existing model |
| Typical use cases | Forecasting, classification, scoring | Content creation, summarization, ideation |
In traditional AI, you own the data and the model — and the burden is on you to label and maintain it.
In generative AI, you often lease intelligence from a foundation model (like GPT-4), and focus on tuning the output via prompts, system design, or fine-tuning.
🧱 What This Means for Product Teams
The difference in training workflows creates a difference in product thinking:
- Traditional AI is like building a custom tool for one job. It’s precise, reliable, and usually scoped to a single task.
- Generative AI is like tapping into a multi-tool with superpowers — adaptable to many jobs, but requiring care and creativity in how you guide it.
From a product lens:
- Traditional AI needs problem-specific training
- Generative AI needs thoughtful prompting and testing
This shift changes how we build AI features, how we collaborate with engineering, and even how we think about iteration.
🚀 The Future Is Layered
The truth is, we need both.
- Traditional AI gives us structure, accuracy, and control.
- Generative AI gives us creativity, speed, and adaptability.
The best AI-driven products of the future will be built on both foundations: using traditional models to analyze, score, or filter — and generative models to explain, ideate, or engage.
👀 Coming Next in the Series:
➡️ Rule-Based vs. Probabilistic: How Traditional and Generative AI Workflows Differ
We’ll explore how each system behaves in real-world workflows — from deterministic pipelines to prompt-driven generation and feedback loops.
