OSFT explained: Prevent catastrophic forgetting in LLM fine-tuning

Even as prompt engineering and model orchestration get more sophisticated, there are tasks where fine-tuning a smaller, specialized large language model (LLM) is the more practical path. It's how you teach a model to handle your specific data, your domain, or your format. Fine-tuning works, until it quietly breaks something you didn't test.You train a model on your data, try a few prompts, and everything looks great. Then you deploy it and discover it's forgotten how to do basic math. Or it stop...