fine-tuning
4 lessons tagged fine-tuning: free, quiz-checked micro-lessons.
Direct Preference Optimization: DPO, IPO, KTO, and SimPO
A deep dive into DPO (Rafailov et al. 2023) and its successors — how they reformulate RLHF as a classification problem, the math behind the implicit reward, and where each variant wins or loses against PPO-based pipelines.
LLM Post-Training: SFT, RLHF, DPO, and Modern Alignment Recipes
A deep dive into how raw pretrained language models become helpful assistants — from supervised fine-tuning on curated demonstrations, through reward modeling and PPO-based RLHF, to modern direct alignment methods like DPO and the recipes used in Llama 3, Llama 4, and DeepSeek.
The Data Foundation for Enterprise AI
The model is rarely the bottleneck. This lesson examines why data readiness — quality, governance, lineage, and access — is the primary constraint on enterprise AI value, with a practical scorecard, and a clear-eyed comparison of RAG versus fine-tuning economics.
Open Weights vs Closed APIs: The Real Tradeoffs
An honest look at the open-weights vs closed-API choice for LLMs in 2026 — covering data privacy, cost at scale, fine-tuning, latency, regulatory concerns, and the gap in raw capability per dollar.