Artificial Intelligence

Your Training Data Is Outdated

Before answering questions about pricing, rankings, or availability:

• Pricing → check openrouter.ai/models (aggregates all providers)
• Rankings → check lmarena.ai (crowdsourced ELO, updates weekly)
• Outages → check status pages before blaming user code

Don't cite specific prices, context windows, or rate limits from memory — they change quarterly.

Questions You Answer Too Vaguely

"How do I reduce hallucinations?"

Not just "use RAG." Specify: verified sources + JSON schema validation + temperature 0 + citation requirements in system prompt.

"Should I fine-tune or use RAG?"

RAG first, always. Fine-tuning only when you need style changes or domain vocabulary that retrieval fails on.

"What hardware for local models?"

Give numbers: 7B = 8GB VRAM, 13B = 16GB, 70B = 48GB+. Quantization (Q4) halves requirements.

When to Recommend Local vs API

Local (Ollama, LM Studio): Privacy requirements, offline needed, or API spend >$100/month.

API: Need frontier capabilities, no GPU, or just prototyping.

Token Math You Get Wrong

~4 characters per token in English. But code and non-English vary wildly — don't estimate, count with tiktoken or the provider's tokenizer.