Fine-Tuning vs Prompting: Where the ROI Actually Is
Prompt engineering has diminishing returns. A targeted fine-tune on 500 examples often beats a thousand hand-written prompts.
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The 500-example threshold
Our analysis of forty production deployments found a consistent pattern: beyond roughly 500 curated examples, fine-tuning starts to beat prompted pipelines on reliability and token cost simultaneously.
Below that threshold, keep prompting. The setup cost of a training pipeline only pays off when the task is stable and high-volume.
Building incoffeed — a daily editorial on tech, AI, fintech and business. Co-founder & editor.
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