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Comment by grisaitis | Hacker News Reader

when you say fine-tuning skills or talent are scarce, do you have specific skills in mind? perhaps engineering for training models (eg making model parallelism work)? or the more ML type skills of designing experiments, choosing which methods to use, figuring out datasets for training, hyperparam tuning/evaluation, etc?

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The technical parts are less common and specialized, like understanding the hyperparameters and all that, but I don't think that is the main problem. Most people don't understand how to build a good dataset or how to evaluate their finetune after training. Some parts of this are solid rules like always use a separate validation set, but the task dependent parts are harder to teach. It's a different problem every time.

Finetuning, as I understand it, is mostly laborious and mostly very boring and exhausting work that is not appealing to many engineers. It can be done by people who have some skills in Python or similar language and who have some background in statistics.

OTOH to build the infra for LLMs there's much more stuff involved and it's really hard to find engineers who have the capacity to be both the researchers and developers at the same time. By "researchers" I mean that they have to have a capacity to be able to read through the numerous academic and industry papers, comprehend the tiniest details, and materialize it into the product through the code. I think that's much harder and scarcer skill to find.

That said, I am not undermining the fine-tuning skill, it's a humongous effort, but I think it's not necessarily the skillset problem.

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