I built a WhatsApp clone of myself; a friend agreed on a password with it

Re:I built a WhatsApp clone of myself; a friend agreed on a ... by bfeynman on Friday June 19, 2026 @05:08PM (#48603268)

probably all AI slop but I find it hilarious in the blog post they actually posture like they would know how to fine tune a model to sound like them given that what they actually did is something that you could one shot with claude if you knew what you were doing.

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Re:I built a WhatsApp clone of myself; a friend agreed on a ... by philipswood on Saturday June 20, 2026 @02:05AM (#48606759)

Fine tuning a model isn't that hard and the tradeoff he described is real.

I was on the fine tuning team of a multi-team hackathon to make a specialized chatbot once a few years ago and despite working technically well our output had very little impact on end to end output.

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Re:I built a WhatsApp clone of myself; a friend agreed on a ... by dandinu on Saturday June 20, 2026 @04:29AM (#48607420)

The method I used in the article is real and is pretty standard. Also, I do a decent amount of distillation and tinkering with weights for work, so I can assure you I did try that before resorting to good 'ol RAG.

Overall, even with a finetuning-as-a-serice like Tinker (the one from Thinking Machines) which is pretty cheap, the economics didn't work out that well.

Also, you probably one-shot this with Claude, I agree. But, you need to have an expensive Max subscription, which not everyone is willing to shell out 200 bucks for, just to have some weekend fun.

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