[solaxun]

I've read that SFT is good for "leveraging existing knowledge" gained during initial pretraining, and helpful in changing the way that the model responds, but not useful for teaching it new knowledge. In your experience is that true?

For example, changing the way in which it responds could be:

  - debate me
  - brainstorm
  - be sarcastic

Which also seems like something that could be accomplished with a system prompt or few shot examples, so I'm not sure when SFT is the more appropriate approach or what the tradeoffs are.

Alternatively, gaining new knowledge would be training it on a dataset of e.g. sports trivia to make it highly effective at answering those types of questions.

P.S. nice username... Irving Fisher would approve.