We Compare AI

Fine-tuning

Training
Simple Definition

Further training a pre-trained AI model on a smaller, task-specific dataset to specialize its behavior.

Full Explanation

Pre-trained foundation models are general-purpose. Fine-tuning adapts them for specific use cases — a customer support chatbot, a medical coding tool, or a legal document analyzer. It's far cheaper than training from scratch. Techniques include supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on examples of desired behavior, and RLHF to align with human preferences.

Example

OpenAI fine-tunes GPT-4 on customer service conversations to create specialized support chatbots.

Last verified: 2026-03-30← Back to Glossary