This table compares a few aspects of the four distinct AI solution building approaches.
Aspect
AI Solutions Approach
Conventional AI
Fine-tuning LLM
Training new AI model
Flow & prompt engineering
Characteristics
Rely on basic techniques such as regression, decision trees, CART or rule-based logic. Requires structured data and programming.
Use a pre-trained LLM to finetune using domain specific dataset to adapt to a particular task. Uses methods such as PEFT, Prompt tuning, RLHF etc.
Build a custom model from scratch using large volumes of raw data without relying on any existing LLM.
Provide structured, contextualized prompt instructions to existing LLMs using few-shot prompting, chain of thought reasoning methods.
Advantages
Good transparency and explainability.
Lower cost due to low computing requirements.
Provides precise outputs.
Reduced cost as only fine-tuning is required.
Benefitted by the LLM vast capabilities.
Faster deployment as not required to build.
Complete control over the architecture.
Not influenced by existing LLM limitations.
Can be customized for highly specialized tasks.
No training or fine-tuning is required.
Faster deployment.
Cost effective.
Flexible adapting to new tasks.
Limitations
Limited scalability options.
Cannot function well with unstructured data.
Extensive feature engineering.
Requires high quality data for fine-tuning.
High computing capability.
Carries risk of over-fitting and bias.
Large dataset requirements.
Tedious and time-consuming development.
High chance of failure.
LLM capabilities limit performance.
Inconsistent output to ambiguous queries.
Best suited for
Simple and well-defined tasks.
Applications with structured data.
Applications with high regulatory compliance.
Domain specific applications.
High quality domain specific data.
Organizations with non-specialized resources.
Specialized needs not served by existing models.
Organizations with specialized resources.
Less critical applications.
Faster development and deployment.
Scenarios with data limitations.