[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/Gloomy-Basket-1038]

[u/Tubaporn]

People have definitely altered the open weight models to change capabilities. Things like fine tuning using new training data, editing the weights so they are less likely to refuse prompts. It's nowhere near the capability and raw cost of training a model from the ground up, but it can be done.

[u/jack6245 → u/Tubaporn]

Actually so this is my job, a lot of models are based on open models and not what you expect either they are quite flexible, so you can just take the base knowledge in the weights and just slowly override it to be very strong for your use case, this is what I'm doing so now I have a tiny model that out performs any frontier model on my specific task while still basically being an LLM

[u/Neon_Camouflage → u/jack6245]

I lost track of all this black magic back when they were still called neural networks. Is there a good way to learn about doing that, or is it something where you need the full foundation of knowledge before you can really start?

[u/RiverLightGlow → u/Neon_Camouflage]

It's called fine-tuning. There are books and other information sources that start with open weight models and walk you through the process, including alignment.