Tinker Fine-tuning vs prompting

by Kondasamy Jayaraman · drawn with Colorfigures by April Zhu

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The bench at rest: the model, and three levers in front of it.

Chapter 4 of 7

Facts move, style stays

Larkspur’s fine-tuned assistant sounds right. Then purchasing cuts the bulk price of the Kestrel K2 scanner, and a customer asks what it costs.

This chapter: When a fact changes, which version gives the new answer, and why?

You will learn

  • Why weights hold what they were trained on, including facts that later change
  • Why documents carry a new fact the moment they are updated
  • How Evals’ key-fact check catches an answer that sounds right and is out of date
Words you’ll meet (2)
Key fact
The short phrase an answer must contain to be right, like a price. Evals’ key-fact check looks for it.
Stale
Out of date: right when the model was trained, wrong now.

The picture on the left is live. Each step below asks you to do one thing in it; the story continues here as you go.

Step 1 of 5

Larkspur’s fine-tuned version learnt prices from past replies, and it signs off the way the team wants. Then purchasing posts a price change. Read it.