Campus Katral · Lesson 11 · 10 min

Fine-tune vs RAG

In one sentence

Fine-tune to change behaviour. RAG to change facts. Mixing them up is how campus demos lie.

Nila

Nila

Campus mentor

AI is not a person. It is a next-word engine with a very good memory of patterns.

Read the idea, watch the picture, then try it with your hands.

Watch the idea

The concept

Question

What you ask

Retrieve

The right page

Answer or refuse

Never invent a citation

Facts outside

Living documents belong in retrieval. Weights are a slow, expensive place to store a timetable.

Behaviour inside

Fine-tune tone or a labelled skill after prompt + RAG plateau. Eval first.

Worked example

The two paths

A short bridge of open books vs a long staircase of labelled pages. Most campus jobs need the bridge.

Picture to keep

Facts outside · Style inside

  1. 1RAG for living documents
  2. 2Fine-tune for behaviour
  3. 3Eval before you spend