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Fine-Tuning Is Overrated. Learn When It Actually Matters.
Every engineer building with LLMs eventually hits the fine-tuning question. The answer is usually "not yet."
In this free online session, Gauntlet AI Lead Instructor Aaron Gallant breaks down fine-tuning, PEFT, and QLoRA – what they actually do, what they cost, and when they're worth reaching for over prompt engineering or better context.
You'll walk away understanding how to synthesize training data from frontier models, how parameter-efficient techniques let you train on a laptop, and why the real bottleneck is always the data, not the model.
If you've been curious about fine-tuning but aren't sure it's the right move for your use case, this is the session.
Live. Free. No upsell. Wednesday, June 3 at 5 PM CT. Register here.
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—— ON THIS DAY ——
JUNE 5, 1968
Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, California, USA
57 years ago
Robert F. Kennedy in 1964 — the Attorney General turned New York senator whose 1968 presidential campaign offered a politics of coalition-building across racial and economic lines that had never been attempted in American politics at that scale.
Robert Francis Kennedy was shot at approximately 12:15 a.m. on June 5, 1968, in a pantry corridor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, minutes after delivering his victory speech for the California Democratic primary. He was forty-two years old. He died at 1:44 a.m. on June 6, 1968. His assassin was Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-Jordanian immigrant who was arrested at the scene. Kennedy was the second of four major political assassinations in America in the 1960s: John F. Kennedy (1963), Medgar Evers (1963), Martin Luther King Jr. (April 4, 1968), and Robert Kennedy (June 5, 1968).
Kennedy had entered the 1968 Democratic primary race in March, following the unexpected strength of Eugene McCarthy's anti-war campaign against incumbent President Lyndon Johnson. His campaign was built on an unusual coalition: urban Black and Latino voters, working-class white Catholics, anti-war students, and farm workers. In a political landscape fractured by race, Vietnam, and the assassinations of King and his brother, Kennedy was attempting something that most political professionals considered impossible — to hold together a coalition that no candidate since had successfully replicated.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, 1971 — the hotel where RFK was shot in the pantry corridor just after midnight on June 5, 1968, minutes after declaring victory in the California Democratic primary.
Kennedy's transformation from his brother's ruthless campaign manager and Attorney General into the empathetic candidate of 1968 is one of the most documented personal evolutions in American political history. His experiences with poverty — touring Appalachia, walking through the Mississippi Delta, visiting South African townships — had shifted him significantly from the hard Cold Warrior of the early 1960s. His April 4, 1968 speech announcing Martin Luther King's assassination to a Black audience in Indianapolis — where he quoted Aeschylus from memory and asked for reconciliation rather than revenge — is considered one of the finest pieces of spontaneous oratory in American political history. Indianapolis had no riots that night.
The circumstances of his assassination have been contested for decades. Sirhan Sirhan was convicted and has been imprisoned ever since, consistently claiming no memory of the shooting. A forensic analysis conducted in the 1970s by criminologist William Harper concluded that the bullet that killed Kennedy came from a different direction than the position from which Sirhan was firing — suggesting a possible second shooter. The Los Angeles Police Department disputed this analysis. Sirhan has been denied parole multiple times; a 2021 parole recommendation was reversed by California Governor Gavin Newsom.
The question of what a Kennedy presidency would have looked like is the most argued counterfactual in American political history. Would he have won the nomination? Would he have beaten Nixon? Would he have ended the Vietnam War? None of these are answerable, and all of them have been argued exhaustively. What is clearer is that his death, five months after Martin Luther King's, left the Democratic coalition without the political figure who had most credibly claimed to be able to hold it together — and that the coalition fell apart at the Chicago convention that summer in ways that elected Richard Nixon.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
RFK's assassination completed a sequence of political killings in the 1960s that fundamentally altered American political culture. By the time Kennedy died, in the same year as King and five years after his brother, the question of whether American public life was capable of sustaining visionary political leadership without killing it had become unavoidable. The trauma of these assassinations shaped American politics for decades.
The 1968 Democratic primary and convention represent the moment when the New Deal coalition definitively collapsed. The coalition of urban workers, minorities, Southern whites, and progressive intellectuals that had governed American politics since FDR could not survive Vietnam, civil rights, and the deaths of its most compelling leaders. The fault lines that opened in 1968 are still legible in American political geography today.
The unresolved questions about the Kennedy assassination maintain it as an active controversy in American forensic and legal history. Sirhan Sirhan's parole hearings regularly revisit the forensic evidence. The questions raised by the bullet trajectory analysis have never been definitively answered. The case remains open in ways that the public record does not fully resolve.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On June 5, 1968, the man who was winning the Democratic nomination was shot in a hotel pantry and died the next day. He was the fourth major political assassination in five years. What his presidency might have been is the most argued counterfactual in American history. The coalition he was building never came together again.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not."
— Robert F. Kennedy, quoting George Bernard Shaw — his standard closing lines on the campaign trail, 1968
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about RFK's 1968 campaign, the coalition he was building, his personal transformation from the 1960s to 1968, the disputed forensic evidence from his assassination, and the counterfactual question of what his presidency might have been?
