AI glossary

What is Fine-tuning?

Fine-tuning is further training an existing AI model on your own examples so it better fits a specific task, tone, or domain. It changes the model's behavior, unlike prompting or RAG, which change only the input. It is powerful but costly, and often unnecessary once good prompting is in place.

For most people and businesses, strong prompting plus RAG solves the problem without fine-tuning. Fine-tuning makes the most sense for narrow, repeated tasks at large scale.

Put the theory to work.

Kognitaa teaches these ideas by doing, on real tasks in Claude. The free Foundations level costs nothing.

Related terms

Prompt engineeringRetrieval augmented generation (RAG)Large language model (LLM)