Fine-tuning
Definition
Training an already-trained model a little more on a smaller, focused dataset so it gets better at a specific task or style.
In plain English
Training a big model from scratch takes enormous amounts of data and computing power. Fine-tuning starts from a model that already knows a lot and adjusts it with a much smaller set of examples.
Because the dataset is small, fine-tuning can easily overfit, so it’s checked against held-out examples as it goes.
Example
Taking a general language model and training it further on 2,000 of your support tickets so it answers in your company's tone and knows your product names.
Draft, not yet reviewed by a person · Updated Nov 2026