#Fine Tuning
PewDiePie says OpenAI banned his account twice for distillation while he was training Ajax, a local Qwen 3.5 9B with refusals removed by Heretic. What model distillation is, how OpenAI detects it (the report on the Moonshot case came out two days earlier), what's inside Ajax, and where the line sits between legitimate synthetic data and a ban on your account.
The decision most people get wrong by overshooting. Objective criteria for choosing between prompt, RAG, and fine tuning, what each path costs with real numbers, the three rare cases where training a model wins, and the five-minute test that separates a knowledge problem from a retrieval problem. Plus the news that changes the math: OpenAI is shutting down its fine-tuning platform.