> If you want to be able to do Q&A against an existing corpus of documentation, can fine-tuning an LLM on that documentation get good results, or is that a waste of time compared to the trick where you search for relevant content and paste that into a prompt along with your question?

If you want exact detailed recall, then using a framework that provides search and recall (by embeddings or otherwise) is probably always going to beat fine tuning, but also remember, it doesn’t have to be either-or.

I mean, if you want a person to handle Q&A on a corpus, is it better for them to have studied it, or have direct access to the corpus with an appropriate index? The answer is clearly that its better if they’ve trained and have access to the corpus, and while LLMs aren’t the same as people, I think the answer for them is the same here.