How Many Examples Does Fine-Tuning Actually Need?

A listener has 150 hand-labelled dictated prompts and wants to know if that's a start or a third of what he needs — and his architect wife has the same question about photographs of buildings. This episode works through the real answer: count examples per label, not in total; treat vendor minimums as proof-of-concept ceilings rather than floors; and measure your own learning curve instead of trusting forum numbers. Along the way: why your test set is the hidden bottleneck, why fifty photos of one building are closer to one example than fifty, and how active sampling can make the next batch of annotation count for more than the first. Episode 6221 — myweirdprompts.com/n/6221 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/888445)