Barebones llama is just a text completion model. You can give it a prompt like A conversation between a human and assistant Human: How old is the sun?

Barebones llama is just a text completion model. You can give it a prompt like A conversation between a human and assistant Human: How old is the sun? Assistant: And it will complete it. Alpaca/Dalai are finetuned on a dataset that's formatted as this: ### Instruction: {instruction} ### Input: {input} ### Response: So even without pre-prompting in this format it's going to be heavily biased towards performing completions in this format anyways. It's always helpful to finetune on a preformatted prompt depending on what your task is.