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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Fine-tuning an open-weight model vs a closed API's fine-tuning offering

#finetuning #openweight #modelproviders

Some model providers offer a hosted fine-tuning service on their closed models — upload data, get back a custom endpoint. This trades control for convenience, and the trade is worth understanding before committing to either path.

Hosted fine-tuning on a closed model

  • No infrastructure to manage; upload data, wait, get an endpoint.
  • You can't inspect, quantize, or self-host the resulting weights — you depend on that provider indefinitely.
  • Pricing is usually per-token on top of the base model's rate, which compounds at scale.

Fine-tuning an open-weight model yourself

More setup (GPU access, training code, evaluation), but you own the weights, can quantize and self-host, and aren't locked to one provider's pricing or availability. For a portfolio project specifically, owning the artifact usually matters more than convenience.

See picking a base model to fine-tune in 2026.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour giving a talk titled 'How and what I do', with demo videos of his products Vaidya and Annapurna on screen
Talking through the products he has shipped

Pranjul Rathour in a black t-shirt holding a microphone in front of a chequered wall
On the mic

Pranjul Rathour pitching with a microphone in front of a projector slide at CSJMU, Kanpur
Pitching at CSJMU, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour speaking from the podium at VSICS, Kanpur
At the VSICS podium, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour holding a trophy and a certificate of merit after a win
Trophy and certificate after a win

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-11.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

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