We don't sell fine-tuning tools - we're an open tool for finding the best way of running your AI workload. We support evaluating/comparing a variety of methods: prompting, prompt generators (few shot, repairs), various models, and fine-tuning from 5 different providers.

The focus of the tool is that it lets you try them all, side by side, and easily evaluate the results. Fine-tuning is one tool in a tool chest, which often wins, but not always. You should use evals to pick the best option for you. This also sets you up to iterate (when you find bugs, want to change the product, or new models comes out).

Re:demo -- would you want a demo or detailed evals and open datasets (honest question)? Single-shot examples are hard to compare, but the benefits usually come out in evals at scale. I'm definitely open to making this. Open for suggestions on what would be the most helpful (format and use case).

It's all on Github and free: https://github.com/kiln-ai/kiln

Chiming in here to say that I was tasked to implement a fine tuning method for my AI startup and I also couldn't find any actual implemented outputs. There are piles of tutorials and blog posts and extensive documentation on hugging face transformers about the tools provided to do this, but I was unable to find a single demonstration of 'here is the base model output' vs 'here is the fine tuned output'. Doesn't have to be online like you suggested, even a screenshot or text blob showing how the fine tuning affected it would be useful.

I am in a similar boat to you where I have developed a great sense for how the bots will respond to prompting and how much detail and context is required because I've been able to iterate and experiment with this. But have no mental model at all about how fine tuning is meant to perform.

I can't really show an interactive demo, but my team at my day job has been fine tuning OpenAI models since GPT-3.5 and fine tuning can drastically improves output quality & prompt adherence. Heck, we found you can reduce your prompt to very simple instructions, and encode the style guidelines via your fine tuning examples.

This really only works though if:

1) The task is limited to a relatively small domain (relatively small could probably be misnomer, as most LLMs are trying to solve every-problem-all-at-once. As long as you are having it specialize in a specific field even, FT can help you achieve superior results.) 2) You have high quality examples (you don't need a lot, maybe 200 at most) Quality is often better than quantity here.

Often, distillation is all you need. Eg, do some prompt engineering on a high quality model (GPT-4.1, Gemini-Pro, Claude, etc.) - generate a few hundred examples, optionally (ideally) check for correctness via evaluations, and then fine tune a smaller, cheaper model. The new fine tuned model will not perform as well at generalist tasks as before, but it will be much more accurate at your specific domain, which is what most businesses care about.

> Here's a suggestion: show me a demo!

Yes, yes and yes again!

Also, please don't use GIFs in your demos! It's freaking me out, because the speed of your GIF playback doesn't match my information absorption speed and I can't pause, look closely, go back, I just need to wait the second loop of your GIF

I've seen many YouTube videos claiming that fine tuning can significantly reduce costs or make a smaller model perform like a larger one.

Most of them were not from fine-tuning tools or model sellers.

> how it was fine-tuned - all of the training data that was used

It's not that sophisticated. You just need a dataset of prompts and the expected answer. And obviously a way to score the results, so you can guide the fine tuning.

> For the last two years I've been desperately keen to see just one good interactive demo

Clearly you’re not actually working in the field, otherwise you could have figured this out yourself in much less than two years.

Why is it that you expect others to fill gaps in your knowledge of something you don’t work on without you exerting any effort?

Lot's of tools for each of those separately (RAG and fine-tuning). We're working on combining them but it's not ready yet.

You don't need a big GPU cluster. Fine-tuning is quite accessible via both APIs and local tools. It can be as simple as making API calls or using a UI. Some suggestions:

- https://getkiln.ai (my tool): let's you try all of the below, and compare/eval the resulting models

- API based tuning for closed models: OpenAI, Google Gemini

- API based tuning for open models: Together.ai, Fireworks.ai

- Local tuning for open models: https://unsloth.ai (can be run on Google Collab instances if you don't have local Nvidia GPUs).

Usually the building the training set and evaluating the resulting model is the hardest part. Another plug: Kiln support synthetic data gen and evals for these parts.

I have not yet heard of vertical agents. Any good resources?

Yup! I'll have to write some of these up. I can probably do open datasets and evals too. If you have use cases you'd like to see let me know! Some quick examples (task specific performance):

- fine-tuning improved performance of Llama 70B from 3.62/5 to (worse than Gemma 2B) to 4.27/5 (better than GPT 4.1), as measured by evals

- Generating valid JSON improved from <1% success rate to >95% after tuning

You can also optimize for cost/speed. I often see a 4x speedup and reducing costs by 90%+, while matching task-specific quality.

Fine tuning is also about reducing costs. If you can bake half the prompt in the model through fine tuning, this can halve the running costs.

As an example Genatron is made possible by fine-tuning in order to create entire applications that are valid. It's similar to the valid json example, where you want to teach specific concepts through examples to ensure the correct syntactic and semantic outputs.

The best ones so far are fine-tunes. But I agree those numbers aren't great and we haven't figured out tool-calling yet

https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu/leaderboard.html

Qwen3, Gemma, Mistral are open source and good at tool calling.

"What is the best way to augment the model with new knowledge other than at runtime using RAG?

I'm afraid the answer is "at runtime using RAG".

Don't fall into the trap of assuming that RAG has to mean janky vector embeddings though. There are many different ways to implement RAG. Good old fashioned FTS search (using tools like Elasticsearch or Solar or even PostgreSQL/MySQL/SQLite FTS) it's a lot less complicated and less expensive to set up and can provide extremely good results.

A lot of of the common RAG techniques were put together a couple of years ago when models were less capable and input limits were still around 8000 tokens.

The models today are much cheaper, far better and mostly have 100,000+ token input limits. This opens up all sorts of new RAG possibilities.

I am very excited at the moment by tool-driven RAG: implement a "search" tool for an LLM to use and prompt it to try several iterations on its search terms before it gives up.

o3 and o4-mini do this in ChatGPT with their web search tool and the results are extremely convincing.

Depends on the definition of "knowledge"; there's a lot of factors that go into it. Some of the common approaches are continued/continual pretraining and model editing (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12598).

* Models are bad at learning that A=B implies B=A, let alone more complicated relations; augmenting the dataset with multiple examples with different phrasing/perspectives is important (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00213). The frequency that a relation occurs in the dataset affects the results (https://arxiv.org/html/2504.09597v2).

* You have to be able to balance preserving existing knowledge against the new knowledge (https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14502). There are techniques like making sure your data mix corresponds to the original training data, but new data is primed by existing data so it gets complicated (https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09522).

* Curriculum training (a la Phi) can be quite effective for training knowledge into base models at the very least.

* Continued pretraining is much more difficult than most finetuning, though it is possible (https://unsloth.ai/blog/contpretraining).

* Model editing of individual facts is possible but tricky because everything is interconnected but the model isn't great at figuring out reciprocal relationships (https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.16218). There's been some slow progress, though I find that few people are aware that it is even possible, despite the progress that has been made (https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowledgeEditingPapers).

The keywords you want are knowledge injection, domain adaptation, continual pretraining, model editing.

Context window + prompt caching if you can't use RAG. Can add a lot to long context models, and their needle in haystack metrics keep getting better.

Why can't you use RAG?

LoRA and QLoRA are still fine tuning I thought? Just updating a subset of parameters. You are still training a base model that was pre-trained (and possibly fine tuned after).