CJ Zafir (@cjzafir) “If you love fine-tuning open-source models (like me), then listen. > Start with” — TopicDigg

If you love fine-tuning open-source models (like me), then listen. > Start with 1B, 2B, 4B, and 8B models. (Don't start with a 27B model or bigger at first.) > Use WebGPU providers. I use Google Colab Pro for any model smaller than 9B. A single A100 80GB costs around $0.60/hr, which is cheap. Enough for small models. > Don’t buy GPUs unless you fine-tune 7 to 10 models. You'll understand the nitty-gritty in the process. > Use Codex 5.5 × DeepSeek v4 Pro to create datasets. Codex to plan, DeepSeek v4 Pro to generate rows. > Use Unsloth's instruct models as a base from Hugging Face. Yes, there are others too, but Unsloth also provides fast fine-tuning notebooks. > Use Unsloth's fine-tuning notebooks as a reference. Paste them into Codex, and Codex will write a custom notebook with the configs you need. > Spend 1 day learning about: - SFT (supervised fine-tuning) - RL training (GRPO, DPO, PPO, etc.) - LoRA / QLoRA training - Quantization and types - Local inference engines (llama.cpp) - KV cache and prompt cache > Just get started. Claude, Codex, and ChatGPT can design a step-by-step plan for how you can fine-tune your first AI model. Future tech is moving toward small 5B to 15B ELMs (Expert Language Models) rather than general 1T LLMs. So fine-tuning is an important skill that anyone can acquire today. Tune models, test them, use them. Then fine-tune for companies and make a career out of it. (Companies pay $50k+ to fine-tune models on their data so they can get personalized AI models.) Shoot your questions below. I'll be sharing in-depth raw findings about this topic in the coming days.