> How can someone get into using these models
You can use gradio(online) or download(git will not download, it's too big, do it manually) the weights at https://huggingface.co/lmsys/vicuna-13b-delta-v1.1/tree/main and then load the model in pytourch and try inference(text generation). But you'll need either a lot of RAM(16GB,32GB+) or VRAM(Card).
> How might I go about using these models for doing things like say summarizing news articles or video transcriptions Again, you might try online or setup a python/bash/powershell script to load the model for you so you can use it. If you can pay I would recommend runpod for the shared GPUs.
> When someone tunes a model for a task, what exactly are they doing and how does this ‘change’ the model? From my view ... not much ... "fine-tuning" means training(tuning) on a specific dataset(fine, as in fine-grained). As I believe(I'm not sure) they just run more epochs on the model with the new data you have provided it until they reach a good loss(the model works), that's why quality data is important.
You might try https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui they have a pretty easy setup config. Again, you'll need a lot of RAM and a good CPU for inference on CPU or a GPU.
https://huggingface.co/lmsys/vicuna-13b-delta-v1.1/tree/main
Yeah it wouldn't be as flexible as a LLM (for example synonyms won't work), but I doubt that for this particular task it'll be that big of problem, and you can ask it to tweak the program in various ways (for example introducing crude spaced-repetition) making it arguably better than the AI solution which takes sometime to prompt engineer and will never be "perfect".
I don't really know how much better fine-tuning makes these models, so I can't think of anything that they can actually be used for where they aren't worse than traditional programs, maybe as an AI in games? for example making them role-play as a historical figure in Civilization 6.
Overall I like the progress: LLama releases -> LLama fine turned on larger models gets similar performance to ChatGPT on lower parameters(more efficient) -> People can replicate LLama's model without anything special, effectively making LLMs a "Commodity" -> You are Here.