Chapter 6 of 10All chapters
Chapter 6 of 10
Customising a model
Three levels of effort.
The options
Prompting shapes behaviour per request. Retrieval supplies documents at run time. Fine-tuning adjusts weights on your own examples. Cost and effort rise steeply in that order.
- Most problems that look like they need fine-tuning need better retrieval.
- Fine-tuning teaches style and format more reliably than it teaches facts.
Evaluating
Write a set of representative inputs with expected qualities before changing anything. Without that, comparisons between prompts or models are impressions rather than evidence.