Adapting a Model You Did Not Train
Deciding What Actually Needs Changing
Last timeOne Model, Many Customers
Most gaps that look like they need training turn out to need a better prompt or a lookup, and knowing which kind of gap you have saves the whole expense.
Everything in this course has been about how to change a model. This lesson is
about whether to. The honest answer, most of the time, is that the gap you are
looking at does not need training at all, and the expensive part of the decision
is working out which kind of gap you have before you reach for a tool.
Three gaps that look the same
A wrong answer is a wrong answer. From the outside, a model that has never heard
of your product, a model that will not produce the output shape your system
expects, and a model that was simply never told what you wanted all fail in the
same way: the response comes back and it is not what you needed. They have
different cures, and applying the wrong one wastes weeks.
The first gap is knowledge. Your internal documents, this quarter's prices, the
customer's own history. Training on these buries them in the weights, where they
cannot be cited, cannot be corrected when they change, and cannot be removed when
a customer leaves. Fetching the relevant passage and placing it in the context
keeps all three of those possible, and handles a document that was added this
morning.
The second gap is instruction. The model was never told, in words, what the output
should look like or what it should refuse. This is far more common than it sounds,
and the fix takes an afternoon.
The third gap is behaviour: a shape, a tone, a vocabulary, or a judgement that the
model will not hold to consistently even when it has been asked clearly and shown
examples. That is the gap a trained correction closes, and it is the only one of
the three where training is the first good answer rather than the last resort.
The lesson stops here
7 more paragraphs to go
You have read the opening. The rest of the argument, the problems that check whether it landed, and the lines worth keeping at the end all come with a plan.
The first lesson of every course in the library reads the whole way through, free, so you can see exactly what the rest of them are.
See the planThe contentsThis is the reading half
Starting the course gives you your own copy of it. Every idea on every page has problems standing under it, marked with a reason rather than a tick, and any sentence you do not believe can be opened and argued with. None of that can happen on a page nobody owns.
The contents