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Just realized how much better a simple fine-tune is than a complex prompt for my chatbot
I spent the last two months trying to get a chatbot to give good answers about local tax codes for my small business. At first, I followed the popular advice and wrote these huge, detailed prompts with tons of rules and examples. I must have tried 50 different versions, each one more complex than the last. The results were always a bit off, and it took forever to get a decent reply. Then, I took a weekend and gathered about 200 real questions and answers from my own customer emails. I used that to fine-tune a smaller, open-source model. The difference was night and day. The fine-tuned model just gets it right, every time, and it's way faster. Everyone talks about prompt engineering like it's magic, but for a real job, a little bit of focused training data beats a clever prompt any day. Has anyone else found that simpler, trained models work better for specific tasks than trying to guide a big one?
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lucashart6mo ago
My friend had the same issue with his gardening bot... a small fine-tuned model just worked.
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caleb_ross126mo ago
Your friend's gardening bot is basically the KISS principle in action.
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felix_lane996mo ago
Honestly makes sense, smaller models can be way more focused.
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