Video · 17 min
Why retrieval beats fine-tuning
Key takeaway: Retrieval is updatable, auditable and cheap; fine-tuning bakes knowledge in and cannot cite sources.
The comparison
- Freshness: change a document and retrieval is instantly current; fine-tuning needs retraining.
- Auditability: retrieval can show the passage it used, so answers are checkable.
- Access control: you can filter retrieval per user; weights cannot be filtered.
- Cost: indexing documents is far cheaper than a training run.
When fine-tuning is still right
Fine-tune for consistent format, house style, or a narrow classification task where you have thousands of labelled examples. Even then, keep knowledge in retrieval.
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