Blogs

1. Zhan Shi, Rui Sun, Bing He, The Hidden Language of AI: How Chat Templates Reveal the Evolution of LLMs, Blog Link, October 2025

   Blog Summary: The blog explains that “chat templates”—the hidden formatting that turns role-tagged messages into the exact token strings models were trained on—have quietly driven LLMs’ evolution from plain text completion to multi-turn assistants to tool-enabled agents. It traces the shift from early prompt hacks to role labels and system prompts (which enforce persona and rules), then shows how different ecosystems (OpenAI, Llama, Mistral, Qwen) adopted incompatible templates, prompting Hugging Face’s Jinja-based standardization. We also provide practical guides that using the wrong template degrades quality, highlights the token-economics of template design, and forecasts templates expanding to handle tool use, multi-agent threads, million-token contexts, and richer modalities.