[cleverwebble]

I can't really show an interactive demo, but my team at my day job has been fine tuning OpenAI models since GPT-3.5 and fine tuning can drastically improves output quality & prompt adherence. Heck, we found you can reduce your prompt to very simple instructions, and encode the style guidelines via your fine tuning examples.

This really only works though if:

1) The task is limited to a relatively small domain (relatively small could probably be misnomer, as most LLMs are trying to solve every-problem-all-at-once. As long as you are having it specialize in a specific field even, FT can help you achieve superior results.) 2) You have high quality examples (you don't need a lot, maybe 200 at most) Quality is often better than quantity here.

Often, distillation is all you need. Eg, do some prompt engineering on a high quality model (GPT-4.1, Gemini-Pro, Claude, etc.) - generate a few hundred examples, optionally (ideally) check for correctness via evaluations, and then fine tune a smaller, cheaper model. The new fine tuned model will not perform as well at generalist tasks as before, but it will be much more accurate at your specific domain, which is what most businesses care about.

[jcheng]

200 examples at most, really?? I have been led to believe that (tens of) thousands is more typical. If you can get excellent results with that few examples, that changes the equation a lot.

[energy123]

Probably the general performance keeps deteriorating with more examples, so more is not always better