Why does nobody talk about the real cost of fine-tuning a big model?
I spent the last two months trying to get a small open-source model to do a specific task for my company. We used a service that charged us about $2000 for the fine-tuning job. The results were okay, but the model was slow and needed a big server to run. Last week, I tried a new method called prompt engineering with a much bigger model, but through an API. For the same task, it costs us maybe $50 a month and works way better right out of the box. The difference was the hidden cost of time and hardware. Everyone gets excited about training their own AI, but for most real jobs, you're better off just using a smart prompt on a model that already knows everything. Has anyone else found that building your own thing is just a huge money pit compared to using an API?