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So… why do people want to fine tune LLMs at home? It seems very unlikely to provide value.

* you’re probably not going to succeed at injecting new knowledge in a way that feels satisfyingly top of mind to the bot

* you’re probably not going to create such a meaningfully new style that it warrants a Lora like in images

What’s an example use case?



Hmm why would someone on a forum called hacker news want to tinker and explore an exciting new technology. Who can say? One of life’s great mysteries really.


I’m curious what they’re trying to do because I’m curious and I don’t see it. You’re the one being a dismissive dick here.


>So… why do people want to fine tune LLMs at home? It seems very unlikely to provide value.

Asking the first question is fine, but your follow-up comment sounds more dismissive than curious.

That's probably why the snarky response.


I don’t feel that’s accurate given specific bullets explaining why I feel that way and asking why others feel differently but ymmv


I find that available LLMs have difficulty recalling instances in specific works by given authors. For example, if you ask GPT-4 "In which Philip K. Dick novel does the protagonist character consider converting to Judaism and moving to Israel?" it will respond with Dick's best known book _The Man in the High Castle_ and the character Frank Fink. The answer is incorrect. Israel does not exist in the world of that novel; furthermore, the character of Fink already is Jewish. The correct answer is Angel Archer in _The Transmigration of Timothy Archer_.

I have considered the feasibility of fine-tuning an LLM on the writings of a specific author. The idea is that it could aid writing in this way: If I currently am researching a specific author across multiple of their books, I often will get a quote of theirs trapped in my head some length of time after reading it. If I have neglected to jot down (or even to highlight) the source of the quote, I could ask the model where the remembered passage came from and get back a higher-quality response.


Eh, but fine tuning is a very awkward tool to solve those knowledge problems imo.

Author style, maybe, I guess.


Illicit fan fiction. Whether it's image or text models.

It's ALWAYS illicit fan fiction.


Consensual sex between Gilligan and the Professor is not a crime.


I mean I’ve seen the expressive niches on image models of civitai, but do you really need custom fine tuned LLMs for text fanfiction?

Like sure, you need something that is not the friendly question answerer; but do you really need such a broad population as in images to suit your needs? I’m guessing no?




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