Fine-Tuning TinyLlama

1. Why TinyLlama? “Sometimes, smaller isn’t just faster — it’s smarter.” I’ve fine-tuned a bunch of models over the past few months — Mistral, Phi, even the newer LLaMA variants. But when I stumbled upon TinyLlama, it hit a sweet spot I didn’t expect. If you’re working with constrained resources — say, a single A100 … Read more

Fine-Tuning Gemini: A Step-by-Step Guide

1. Why I Fine-Tuned Gemini Instead of Using It Out-of-the-Box “A model that knows everything—until it needs to know your everything.” That pretty much sums up my experience with base Gemini. When I first got access to Gemini Pro via Google Cloud, I was genuinely impressed by the zero-shot reasoning. It was fast, fluent, and … Read more

Fine-Tuning LLaMA 3: A Practical Guide

1. Why Fine-Tune LLaMA 3 Instead of Just Prompting? “Give a man a prompt and you solve one task. Teach a model through fine-tuning, and you automate that task forever.” I’ve worked with LLMs long enough to know that prompting can only take you so far. I remember this specific internal project where we were … Read more

Fine-Tuning LLaMA 2: A Practical Guide

1. Why Fine-Tune LLaMA 2 Instead of Using It Out-of-the-Box? “You don’t need a scalpel to slice bread — unless the bread is custom-made and laced with data-specific requirements.” That’s pretty much how I explain fine-tuning to other folks on my team. Here’s the deal: I’ve worked on projects where prompt engineering just couldn’t cut … Read more

Fine-Tuning Alpaca on Custom Data

1. Prerequisites (But Only the Non-Obvious Stuff) When I first got Alpaca up and running, the biggest roadblocks weren’t the ones you’d expect. It wasn’t about “how to install PyTorch”—it was the stuff that hits you after everything looks set up. GPU Requirements: Don’t Assume It’s Enough I trained Alpaca (7B) with LoRA on a … Read more

Fine-Tuning Bard (PaLM) on Vertex AI

1. Why Fine-Tune PaLM (Bard)? “A well-crafted prompt is a patch; fine-tuning is a firmware upgrade.” I’ve used Bard (backed by PaLM) across a few client-facing NLP use cases — summarization, domain-specific Q&A, and even multi-turn chat systems. And here’s what I’ve found: prompt engineering hits a ceiling pretty fast once your use case goes … Read more