top | item 45634368

(no title)

bjornsing | 4 months ago

Will Anthropic/OpenAI really hire anyone who can fine-tune an LLM?

discuss

order

gdiamos|4 months ago

They will hire anyone who can produce a model better than GPT5, which is the bar for fine tuning

Otherwise, you should just use gpt5

Preparing a few thousands training examples and pressing fine tune can improve the base LLM in a few situations, but it also can make the LLM worse at other tasks in hard to understand ways that only show up in production because you didn’t build evals that are good enough to catch them. It also has all of the failure modes of deep learning. There is a reason why deep learning training never took off like LLMs did despite many attempts at building startups around it.

Andrej karpathy has a rant about it that captures some of the failure modes of fine tuning - https://karpathy.github.io/2019/04/25/recipe/

criemen|4 months ago

> They will hire anyone who can produce a model better than GPT5, which is the bar for fine tuning

Depends on what you want to achieve, of course, but I see fine-tuning at the current point in time primarily as a cost-saving measure: Transfer GPT5-levels of skill onto a smaller model, where inference is then faster/cheaper to run. This of course slows down your innovation cycle, which is why generally this is imo not advisable.

kgwgk|4 months ago

> but it also can make the LLM worse at other tasks

The problem is easily avoided by not using it for other tasks.

yunwal|4 months ago

It’s quite easy to produce a model that’s better than GPT-5 at arbitrarily small tasks. As of right now, GPT-5 can’t classify a dog by breed based on good photos for all but the most common breeds, which is like an AI-101 project.

Der_Einzige|4 months ago

Yup! That's why civit.ai doesn't exist right?

They'll pay for anyone that can personalize models to be meaningfully diverse.

danielmarkbruce|4 months ago

I think you misunderstand what they are saying - doing a good job of fine tuning is difficult.

Training an LLM from scratch is trivial - training a good one is difficult. Fine tuning is trivial - doing a good job is difficult. Hitting a golf ball is trivial - hitting a 300 yard drive down the middle of the fairway is difficult.