A $500 RL fine-tune of a 9B open model beat frontier models on catalog review
Summary
A case study shows a $500 RL-fine-tuned 9B open-model beating frontier models on catalog review at 40× cost efficiency. It argues for owning AI through open-source fine-tuning, RL, and internal task data, with several deployments illustrating improved accuracy and lower per-call cost. The piece also provides a practical playbook for SMBs to adopt this approach.