Is fine-tuning dead? Having a frontier model edit small-model weights sparks debate
SignificantZebra5883 · reddit · 2026-11-05
A Reddit discussion on whether fine-tuning is obsolete: viral experiments on Twitter have a frontier model (Astra) directly edit Qwen 0.6B weights, reportedly improving it at math, Pong, Snake and Atari Breakout. The poster asks if this is where small models are heading — could Astra edit a domain-specific Qwen 27B for law, medicine or game dev — and whether the new moat is "only tasks the frontier model itself is bad at." Open questions, no systematic validation yet.
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