How a $500 Fine-Tune Beat Frontier Models on Catalog Review

A $500 RL fine-tune of a 9B open model beat frontier models on catalog review

We discovered that fine-tuning a 9B open-source model with reinforcement learning outperforms expensive frontier models on specific business tasks. By redesigning workflows and training on proprietary data, we achieved 87% quality at just $0.50 per thousand listings. This approach delivers massive cost savings while surpassing the capabilities of general-purpose AI like ChatGPT or Claude for specialized operations.